Otto Rank Orden de los libros

Otto Rank, Sigmund Freud’s closest colleague in Vienna during the formative years of psychoanalysis, published the essay ‘A Dream That Interprets Itself’ in 1910. It was praised highly by Freud, and the seminal essay now appears for the first time in English with an expertly crafted introduction from Robert Kramer about Rank and his work.

La interpretacion de los suenos es una obra de Sigmund Freud. La publicacion inauguro la teoria freudiana del analisis de los suenos, cuya actividad describiria Freud como la via regia hacia el conocimiento de lo inconsciente dentro de la vida animica. Freud plantea que los suenos son una realizacion alucinatoria de deseos y por consecuencia, una via privilegiada de acceso al inconsciente, mediante el empleo del metodo interpretativo fundado en la asociacion libre de los simbolos mas importantes del sueno. El texto es importante ya que Freud expone de forma sistematica su primera teoria sobre el aparato psiquico (o primera topica). Freud senala que demostrara que existe una tecnica psicologica que permite interpretar suenos, y que, si se aplica este procedimiento, todo sueno aparece como un producto psiquico provisto de sentido al que cabe asignar un puesto determinado dentro del ajetreo animico de la vigilia. Intentara, ademas, aclarar los procesos que dan al sueno el caracter de algo ajeno e irreconocible, y desde ellos se remontara a la naturaleza de las fuerzas psiquicas de cuya accion conjugada o contraria nace el sueno. Los suenos, desde el punto de vista freudiano, constituyen formas de "cumplimiento de deseo" - tentativas del inconsciente para resolver un conflicto de alguna clase, ya sea algo reciente o algo procedente de lo mas hondo del pasado. Sin embargo, debido a que la informacion en el inconsciente se encuentra en una indomable y a menudo perturbadora forma, un "censor" en el preconsciente no permitira que pase inalterada a la consciencia. Durante los suenos, el preconsciente es mas laxo en este deber que en horas de vigilia, pero todavia esta atento: como tal, el inconsciente debe falsear y deformar el sentido de su informacion para que pueda pasar a traves de la censura. Asi, las imagenes en los suenos a menudo no son lo que parecen ser, segun Freud, y necesitan de una profunda interpretacion para que puedan informarnos sobre las estructuras del inconsciente.

2010 Reprint of 1952 Edition. First published in 1924, Otto Rank's The Trauma of Birth took as its starting point a note that Freud added to his The Interpretation of Dreams: "Moreover, the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety." Rank set out to identify "the ultimate biological basis of the psychical," the very "nucleus of the unconscious" (p. xxiii). For him this was the physical event of birth, whereby the infant passes from a state of perfectly contented union with the mother to a state of parlous separation via an oppressive experience of asphyxiation, constriction, confinement in the vaginal canal, and so on-all feelings recognizable in anxiety states of every kind. It was the struggle against this traumatic experience of birth, in Rank's account, that structured the fantasy life of the child, including the disavowal of the difference between the sexes, infantile sexual theories, and oedipal scenarios. Castration anxiety was a defensive derivative of the anxiety associated with the birth trauma.

THE prominent civilized nations--the Babylonians and Egyptians, the Hebrews and Hindus, the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans, as well as the Teutons and others--all began at an early stage to glorify their national heroes--mythical princes and kings, founders of religions, dynasties, empires, or cities--in a number of poetic tales and legends. The history of the birth and of the early life of these personalities came to be especially invested with fantastic features, which in different nations--even though widely separated by space and entirely independent of each other--present a baffling similarity or, in part, a literal correspondence. Many investigators have long been impressed with this fact, and one of the chief problems of mythological research still consists in the elucidation of the reason for the extensive analogies in the fundamental outlines of mythical tales, which are rendered still more puzzling by the unanimity in certain details and their reappearance in most of the mythical groupings.

"[Rank's thought] has implications for the deepest and broadest development of the social sciences . . . and of all [Rank's] books, Art and Artist is the most secure monument to his genius." --Ernest Becker