Once a leading disciple and confidant of Freud, Otto Rank parted company with the psychoanalytic community in the 1920s as his writings began focusing more on the cure of neuroses rather than on the seemingly interminable process of fostering a patient's in-depth understanding of them.

A commitment to a more result-oriented form of psychoanalysis led to his publication of The Trauma of Birth (1924), in which Rank moves beyond the Oedipal complex to locate the strongest causes for repression in the child's love and fear of the mother. In this volume of Rank's lectures, Robert Kramer has brought together for the first time the innovator's clearest explanations of his most influential theories. The lectures were delivered in English to receptive audiences of social workers, therapists, and clinical psychologists throughout the United States from 1924 to 1938, the year before his untimely death.

Revealing Rank's intellectual development during this period, they treat such topics as projection and identification, love and will, neurosis as a failure in creativity, and object-relations theory.

Rank, who was a practicing psychotherapist for part of his career, found that scientific research into the Oedipal complex and therapeutic improvement did not coincide. Preoccupation with the Oedipal complex tended to trap the individual in a tragically powerless state.

By tracing repression to the failure to accept birth, the reluctance to let go of the mother, Rank discovered a useful way to help the patient accept his or her own difference within relationships and thereby discover the creativity to change.