Robert Kramer

Robert Kramer, PhD, is Visiting Professor of Psychology at Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, and a practising Rankian psychoanalyst, the only one in the world.

He haslectured on the life and work of Otto Rank at Sigmund Freud University in Vienna; Corvinus University of Budapest; George Washington University; American University; the American Psychological Association; the International Psychoanalytical Association; the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna; the Freud Museum London; The Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar-Ilan University, Israel; the University of Athens Medical School, Greece; the International Institute of Existential and Humanistic Psychology, Beijing; the William Alanson White Institute, New York; the Indiana Society for Psychoanalytic Thought in Indianapolis; the Existential-Humanistic Institute, San Francisco; and the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work in Philadelphia.

He has published in The CEU Review of Books (Budapest), The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Times of Israel (Tel Aviv), and The New European (London).

During academic year 2015–2016, he was the inaugural International Chair of Public Leadership at the National University of Public Service in Budapest, Hungary. In 2016, he resigned his chair in protest against the corruption of the Orbán regime.

His articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals in the US, the UK and, in translation, in Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Spain. His latest article, “Discovering the Existential Unconscious: Rollo May Encounters Otto Rank” (The Humanistic Psychologist, 2023) has been published in translation in Chinese and Russian, and is now being translated into Greek, Turkish and Hungarian. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology (US), founded by Abraham Maslow.

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). His most recent book is The Birth of Relationship Therapy: Carl Rogers Meets Otto Rank (Giessen: Psychosozial Verlag, 2022).

He wrote the 2023 epilogue (entitled "Ernest Becker and the Rankian Century") for the fiftieth anniversary edition of Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, which won the Pulitzer prize in 1974.

His next book, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2023, is entitled, Otto Rank and the Creation of Modern Psychotherapy.