Otto Rank (April 22, 1884 – October 31, 1939) was an Austrian
psychoanalyst. Born in Vienna as Otto Rosenfeld,
he was one of Sigmund Freud's closest colleagues for twenty years, a prolific writer on
psychoanalytic themes, an editor of the two most important analytic journals, managing director of Freud's publishing house and a
creative theorist. In 1925, after Freud accused Rank of "anti-Oedipal" heresy, he chose to leave the inner circle and move away
from Vienna with his wife, Tola, and infant daughter, Helene. For the remaining fifteen years of his life, Rank had an
exceptionally successful career as a lecturer, writer and therapist in France and the U.S.
In the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
In 1905, at the age of 21, Otto Rank presented Freud with a short manuscript on the artist, a study that so impressed Freud he
invited Rank to become secretary of the emerging Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society. Rank thus became the first paid member of the psychoanalytic movement, and Freud's "right-hand" man for almost
twenty years. Freud considered Rank, with whom he was more intimate intellectually than his own sons, to be the most brilliant of
his Viennese disciples.
Rank was one of Freud's six collaborators brought together in a secret "committee" or "ring" to defend the psychoanalytic
mainstream as disputes with Adler and then Jung developed. Rank was the most prolific
author in the "ring" besides Freud himself, extending psychoanalytic theory to the
study of legend, myth, art, and
other works of creativity. He worked particularly closely with Freud, not just in a
secretarial role, but also in contributing two new chapters, on myth and legend, to later editions of "The Interpretation of Dreams". Rank's name appeared underneath Freud's on the title page of
Freud's greatest work for many years. Between 1915 and 1918, Rank served as Acting Secretary in the International Psychoanalytical Association which Freud had founded in 1910.
Everyone in the small psychoanalytic world understood how much Freud respected Rank and his prolific creativity in expanding
psychoanalytic theory.
In 1924 Rank published The Trauma of Birth, exploring how
art, myth, religion, philosophy and therapy were illuminated by separation
anxiety in the “phase before the development of the Oedipus complex” (p. 216). But there was no such phase in Freud’s
theories. The Oedipus complex, Freud explained tirelessly, was the nucleus of the
neurosis and the foundational source of all art, myth, religion, philosophy, therapy – indeed
of all human culture and civilization. It was the first time that anyone in the inner circle had dared to suggest that the
Oedipus complex might not be the supreme causal factor in psychoanalysis. It was also the first time that anyone in the inner
circle had dared to suggest that there was a “pre-Oedipal” complex – a term that did not exist at that time. Rank was the first
to use the term “pre-Oedipal” in a public psychoanalytic forum in 1925 (Rank, 1996, p. 43). In the next edition of the Oxford
English Dictionary, Rank will be credited with coining this term, which is now mistakenly thought to have been introduced by
Freud in 1932.
After some hesitation, Freud distanced himself from The Trauma of Birth, signalling to other members of his inner
circle that Rank was perilously close to anti-Oedipal heresy. Confronted with Freud’s decisive
opposition, Rank chose to resign in protest from his powerful positions as Vice-President of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society,
director of Freud’s publishing house, and co-editor of Imago and Zeitschrift. His closest friend, Sandor Ferenczi, with whom Rank collaborated in the early Twenties on new experiential,
object-relational and "here-and-now" approaches to therapy, abandoned him. The break between Freud and Rank, and the loss of
Rank's tremendous vitality, left a gaping hole in "the cause" that would never be filled by anyone else. Anna Freud replaced Rank on the secret "committee," but could not match his intellect, although Freud loved
her dearly. Ferenczi became more and more alienated from Freud and died broken-hearted in 1933.
Post-Vienna life and work
In May 1926, Rank moved to Paris where he became
an analyst for artists such as Henry Miller and
Anaïs Nin and lectured at the Sorbonne (Lieberman, 1985).
In France and later in America, Rank enjoyed great success as a therapist and writer. Traveling frequently between France and
America, Rank lectured at universities such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Pennsylvania on object-relational, experiential and “here-and-now” psychotherapy, art, the creative will, and
“neurosis as a failure in creativity” (Rank, 1996).
He died in New York City in 1939 from a kidney
infection, one month after Freud's physician-assisted suicide on the Jewish Day of Atonement.
Influence
Rollo May, a pioneer of existential
psychotherapy in the United States, was deeply influenced by Rank’s post-Freudian lectures and writings and always
considered Rank to be the most important precursor of existential therapy. Shortly before his death, Rollo May wrote the foreword
to Robert Kramer's edited collection of Rank’s American lectures. “I have long considered Otto Rank to be the great
unacknowledged genius in Freud’s circle,” said May (Rank, 1996, p. xi).
In 1936 Carl Rogers, the most influential psychologist in America after William James, invited Otto Rank to give a series of lectures in New York on Rank’s post-Freudian models
of experiential and relational therapy. Rogers was transformed by these lectures and always credited Rank with having profoundly
shaped "client-centered" therapy and the entire profession of counselling.
"I became infected with Rankian ideas," said Rogers (Rank, 1996, p. 263).
The New York writer Paul Goodman, who was co-founder with Fritz Perls of the Gestalt method of psychotherapy, one of the most
popular in the world today, and one which makes Otto Rank's here-and-now central to its approach, described Rank’s post-Freudian
ideas on art and creativity as “beyond praise” in Gestalt Therapy (Perls, Goodman and Hefferline, 1951, p. 395).
In 1974, the sociologist Ernest Becker
won the Pulitzer prize for The Denial of Death (1973), which was based on Rank’s
post-Freudian writings, especially Will Therapy (1929-31), Psychology and the Soul (1930) and Art and Artist
(1932).
The American priest and theologian, Matthew Fox, founder of Creation Spirituality and Wisdom University, considers Rank to be one of the most important
psychologists of the 20th century. See, especially, Fox's book, Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet (Jeremy P.
Tarcher, 2002), paperback: ISBN 1-58542-329-7.
Stanislav Grof, a founder of transpersonal
psychology, based much of his work in prenatal and perinatal psychology on Rank's The Trauma of Birth.
Today, Rank can be seen as one of the great pioneers in the fields of humanistic
psychology, existential psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy and transpersonal psychology.
Major publications by date of first publication
| Year |
German Title (Current Edition) |
English Translation (Current Edition) |
| 1907 |
Der Künstler |
The Artist |
| 1909 |
Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden (Turia & Kant, 2000, ISBN 3-85132-141-3) |
The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (Johns Hopkins, 2004, ISBN 0-8018-7883-7) |
| 1911 |
Die Lohengrin Sage [doctoral thesis] |
The Lohengrin Saga |
| 1912 |
Das Inzest-Motiv |
The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend (Johns Hopkins, 1991, ISBN 0-8018-4176-3) |
| 1913 |
Die Bedeutung der Psychoanalyse fur die Geisteswissenschaften [with Hanns Sachs] |
The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Mental Sciences |
| 1914 |
chapters in Sigmund Freud's Die Traumdeutung |
The Interpretation of Dreams |
| 1924 |
Das Trauma der Geburt (Psychosozial-Verlag, 1998, ISBN 3-932133-25-0) |
The Trauma of Birth, 1929 (Dover, 1994, ISBN 0-486-27974-X) |
| 1924 |
Entwicklungsziele der Psychoanalyse [with Sandor Ferenczi] |
The Development of Psychoanalysis / Developmental Goals of Psychoanalysis |
| 1925 |
Der Doppelgänger [written 1914] |
The Double (Karnac, 1989, ISBN 0-946439-58-3) |
| 1929 |
Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit |
Truth and Reality (Norton, 1978, ISBN 0-393-00899-1) |
| 1930 |
(Consists of Volumes II and III of "Technik der Psychoanalyse": Vol. II, "Die Analytische Reaktion in ihren konstruktiven
Elementen"; Vol. III, "Die Analyse des Analytikers und seiner Rolle in der Gesamtsituaton". Copyright 1929, 1931 by Franz
Deuticke.) |
Will Therapy, 1936 (Norton, 1978, ISBN 0-393-00898-3) |
| 1930 |
Seelenglaube und Psychologie |
Psychology and the Soul (Johns Hopkins, 2003, ISBN 0-8018-7237-5) |
| 1932 |
Kunst und Künstler (Psychosozial-Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-89806-023-3) |
Art and Artist (Norton, 1989, ISBN 0-393-30574-0) |
| 1933 |
Erziehung und Weltanschauung : Eine Kritik d. psychol. Erziehungs-Ideologie, München : Reinhardt, 1933 |
Modern Education |
| 1941 |
|
Beyond Psychology (Dover, 1966, ISBN 0-486-20485-5) |
| 1996 |
|
A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures [talks given 1924–1938; edited and with an introductory essay by
Robert Kramer] (Princeton, 1996, ISBN 0-691-04470-8) |
References
Book-length works about Otto Rank.
- Karpf, Fay Berger (1970). The Psychology and Psychotherapy of Otto Rank: An Historical and Comparative Introduction.
Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-8371-3029-8.
- Lieberman, E. James (1985). Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank. Free Press. ISBN 0-684-86327-8.
- Menaker, Esther (1982). Otto Rank: A Rediscovered Legacy. Columbia University Press.
Articles or chapters about Otto Rank.
- Kramer, Robert (2003). Why Did Ferenczi and Rank Conclude that Freud Had No More Emotional Intelligence than a Pre-Oedipal
Child? A chapter in Creative Dissent: Psychoanalysis in Evolution, Edited by Claude Barbre, Barry Ulanov, and Alan Roland
(New York: Praeger Publishers), pp. 23-36.
- Kramer, Robert (1995). The Birth of Client-Centered Therapy: Carl Rogers, Otto Rank, and 'The Beyond,' an article in
Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Volume 35, pp. 54-110.
- Kramer, Robert (1995). The ‘Bad Mother’ Freud Has Never Seen: Otto Rank and the Birth of Object-Relations Theory, an article
in Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, Volume 23, pp. 293-321.
External links
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
