About
Robert Kramer, PhD, is Visiting Professor of Public Leadership at Corvinus University of Budapest. Previously, he was Visiting Professor of Psychology at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest. At ELTE, he taught existential-humanistic psychotherapy and leadership. During Spring 2022, he was Professor of Psychoanalysis at ELTE, only the second person in Hungary to hold this title. The first was Sándor Ferenczi.
During academic year 2015-16, he was the inaugural International Chair of Public Leadership at the National University of Public Service in Budapest, Hungary.
He edited and introduced Otto Rank's "A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures" (Princeton University Press, 1996) and co-edited, with E. J. Lieberman, "The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: Inside Psychoanalysis" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).
In 2022 he published "The Birth of Relationship Therapy: Carl Rogers Meets Otto Rank" (Psychosozial Press, second ed.). In 2024 he published Otto Rank's "A Dream That Interprets Itself" with Karnac Books (U.K.). His next book, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2025, is entitled, "Otto Rank and the Creation of Modern Psychotherapy."
His writings have appeared in the U.S., the U.K. and, in translation, in Austria, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Spain. His latest article, "Discovering the Existential Unconscious: Rollo May Encounters Otto Rank" ("The Humanistic Psychologist," March 2023) has been published in translation in Hungarian, Chinese, and Russian.
Before he moved to Budapest, he was Director of Executive Education for U.S. government leaders at American University’s School of Public Affairs in Washington, DC. In 2002, he created "transformative action learning," a Rankian leader development process based on existential-humanistic principles, and introduced it into the executive leadership curriculum at AU and at other universities around the world.
In 2002, he received the Outstanding Teacher Award at AU. In 2004, he won the Curriculum Innovation Award of the American Society for Public Administration. From 2002-2004, he was an elected member of the Board of Directors of the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society for Management Educators, a group of 650 professors worldwide.
For 25 years, he served in progressively senior positions in the U.S. government, including two years on Vice-President Al Gore's task force to reinvent the Federal government.
In 1999, he was selected by the U.S. State Department to be a Fulbright Professor in Hungary, and taught leadership at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.
Applying Otto Rank's existential-humanistic approach, he has consulted on leader development to corporate, government and civil society organizations around the world. Clients included Pfizer Corporation; Boeing Corporation; the World Bank; the European Commission in Brussels and Luxembourg; the European Environmental Agency in Copenhagen; the Prime Minister’s Office in Tallinn, Estonia; the National Research University’s Higher School of Economics in Moscow and St. Petersburg; the Moscow State University of Pedagogy; the University of Haifa; the Philippine Academy of Development; almost all agencies of the US Government, and the Department of Human Services in the City of Alexandria in the US.
He holds a PhD in management, with a specialization in the intellectual history of psychoanalysis, from the George Washington University School of Business and Public Management in Washington DC.
Featured Work
The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: Inside Psychoanalysis (co-edited with E.J. Lieberman)
Sigmund Freud’s relationship with Otto Rank was the most constant, close, and significant of his professional life. Freud considered Rank to be the most brilliant of his disciples. The two collaborated on psychoanalytic writing, practice, and politics; Rank was the managing director of Freud’s publishing house; and after several years helping Freud update his masterpiece, "The Interpretation of Dreams," Rank contributed two chapters. His was the only other name ever to be listed on the title page. This complete collection of the known correspondence between the two brings to life their twenty-year collaboration and their painful break.
The 250 letters compiled by E. James Lieberman and Robert Kramer humanize and dramatize psychoanalytic thinking, practice, and organization from 1906 through 1925. The letters concern not just the work and trenchant contemporaneous observations of Freud and Rank but also their friendships, supporters, rivals, families, travels, and other personal and professional matters. Most interestingly, the letters trace Rank’s growing independence, the father-son schism over Rank’s "anti-Oedipal" heresy, his surprising reconciliation with Freud, and the moment when they parted ways permanently. A candid picture of how the pioneers of modern psychotherapy behaved with their patients, colleagues, and families—and each other—the correspondence between Freud and Rank demonstrates how psychoanalysis developed in relation to early twentieth-century science, art, philosophy, and politics.
A rich primary source on psychiatry, history, and culture, "The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank" is a cogent and powerful narrative of early psychoanalysis and its two most important personalities.
E. James Lieberman, M.D., is a clinical professor emeritus in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the George Washington University School of Medicine. He has written, edited, and translated a number of books, including two by Otto Rank, "Psychology and the Soul" and "The Myth of the Birth of the Hero," both published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Robert Kramer, PhD, is Director of Leadership Development at the Existential-Humanistic Institute of Europe, with branches in Madrid, Budapest and Athens. He is editor of Otto Rank's "A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures" (Princeton University Press, 1996) and author of "The Birth of Relationship Therapy: Carl Rogers Meets Otto Rank" (Psychosozial Press, 2022).
REVIEWS
"An accessible primary source on the history of psychoanalysis. In places it is gripping, sparing nothing, bringing readers right into the sideshows that can go unseen behind the main event."
— Adam Polnay -The Psychiatrist
"For those well versed in the world of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, for those who are students of Freud, and for those who know the historical players in this game, 'The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank' is a wonderful text filled with excellent research and understanding of the growth and the beginning of the demise of Freudian analysis. It is comprehensive, academic, and a must for those who are historians of the era, historians of psychoanalysis, or those simply curious about the men who started a revolution in mental health."
— New York Journal of Books
"Doctors sometimes like to be perceived as Olympian gods, but these letters remind us how often gods are venal, petty, jealous and spiteful. The excellent book, 'The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: Inside Psychoanalysis,' focuses on the early career of Otto Rank, as one of Freud's most gifted disciples."
— Michael Dirda - Washington Post
"This edited collection provides a critical balance to other published accounts of these men and the early years of the psychoanalytic movement ... should be essential reading for scholars and specialists familiar with the major ideas and players of early psychoanalysis."
— Library Journal
"The book offers much more than a compilation of letters but provides in-depth contextual analysis and refreshingly candid and human perspectives on these men in the early days of the important theory."
— Reference and Research Book News
" 'The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank' is an excellent scholarly resource and makes a substantive contribution by shedding light on Rank and the psychoanalytic movement."
— Simon Boag - PsycCRITIQUES
"A compelling story, and one well worth the study required by a careful reading of this book."
— Clifford Cunningham - Suns News Corporation
"James Lieberman and Robert Kramer are among the most distinguished authorities on Otto Rank. Instead of producing a critical edition of the Freud-Rank letters, as would have been commonplace, they have used the letters to reconstruct the early ‘life’ of the psychoanalytic movement. A gem of a book."
— Robert A. Segal, author of "Myth: A Very Short Introduction"
"Publication of the Rank-Freud correspondence in this important book fills a major gap in our knowledge and understanding of the early years of psychoanalysis and of Rank himself. Lieberman and Kramer have nicely interleaved the surviving letters with biographical material on Rank, relevant excerpts from Freud’s letters to others, and description of the historical context, including World War I and the difficult years that followed."
— David G. Winter, University of Michigan
"For anyone at all interested in the history of the psychoanalytic movement, this 1906-25 exchange of letters, translated here from German, between Freud and his henchman—the 28-years-younger Rank—is a delightful treasure trove ... Suited to a broad audience, the book is not at all obscure. A source on which readers will continue to draw."
— Choice
"There is... something eminently refreshing about a straightforward book like 'The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: Inside Psychoanalysis.'"
— Marcus M. Silverman - Modern Psychoanalysis
"An important exchange of letters. It is very gratifying that it finally has appeared."
— Anna Bentinck von Schoonheten - Luzifer-Amor
