Robert Kramer

Summit Video

A Brief Bio

Robert Kramer, PhD, is Visiting Professor of Psychology at Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, and a practicing Rankian psychoanalyst, the only one in the world. He has published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Times of Israel (Tel Aviv), and The New European (London). During academic year 2015-16, 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 U.S., the U.K. 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 (U.S.), 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 is now writing the 2023 epilogue (entitled “Ernest Becker Meets Otto Rank”) for the 50th 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. In 2023 he will also publish the first English translation of Otto Rank’s classic, A Dream That Interprets Itself.