The Myth of the Birth of the Hero

In this study Rank looks at a a wide variety of Eurasian hero birth narratives, including Greek, Roman, Judeo-Christian, Indian, and Germanic legendary figures. He uses the methodology and vocabulary of classic Freudian psychoanalysis to do so. The middle part of this book, where Rank enumerates some of these tales, will be the most useful for modern readers, as he draws on a wide range of sources, some of them fairly obscure. In the last part he puts these myths 'on the couch' as it were, and ties up his thesis very coherently.

In later years, Rank broke with Freud, who had been somewhat of a father figure to him, ironically fulfilling half of the Oedipus complex about which they parted ways. He moved to Paris in 1926 where he took clients such as Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, who mentions Rank often in her memoirs.

Production notes. This was extracted from the 1959 Vintage reprint of this text in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and other Writings. Page numbers are from that edition. Editorial footnotes and the additional writings from the 1959 edition were omitted. The rest of the (original) footnotes were renumbered on a page-by-page basis.

--J.B. Hare, October 16th, 2006