Dream That Interprets Itself

Sigmund Freud hired Otto Rank as his secretary and funded Rank’s PhD in literature at the University of Vienna. In 1910, at age 26, Rank published 'A Dream That Interprets Itself’. Freud could not praisethe essay highly enough: impressed by Rank’s erudition, Freud invited his protégé to contribute twochapters, on poetry and myth, in 1914 to The Interpretation of Dreams. Thereafter, Rank’s namewould appear under Freud’s on the title page of the foundational text of psychoanalysis for the next fifteen years. Grateful for Freud’s generosity, Rank published a stream of articles and books advancingpsychoanalytic thinking into almost every area of the arts and humanities, thus demonstrating toFreud’s critics that the validity of psychoanalysis did not hinge solely on his autobiographical workThe Interpretation of Dreams. Rank died in 1939 and his work fell out of favor until a renaissance ofinterest beginning in the 1970s.