Otto Rank

Otto Rank (born Otto Rosenfeld; Vienna, 1884 – New York, 1939) was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer and teacher, one of Sigmund Freud's closest collaborators and one of the most original figures of the early psychoanalytic movement. He worked within the Freudian tradition, but his objections to some of Freud's assumptions made him a turning point for later psychotherapy.

The son of a craftsman of Jewish origin, he studied German literature and classical philology in Vienna and earned his doctorate in 1912 with a thesis on the Lohengrin saga, which was published as a book and is considered the first Freudian doctoral dissertation issued in that form. Freud, impressed by a study Rank presented to him in 1905, appointed him secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, a paid post that made him the movement's first salaried member. For almost two decades he was among Freud's most trusted associates. He belonged to the secret committee that defended psychoanalysis, directed the movement's publishing house founded in 1919, and contributed to its journals. His studies of myth, legend, art and the motif of the double extended psychoanalysis into culture.

In 1924 he published The Trauma of Birth, arguing that the anxiety of separation at birth comes before the Oedipus complex and shapes art, myth, religion and philosophy. His proposal of a pre-Oedipal stage centred on the mother challenged Freud's view that the Oedipus complex, centred on the father, was the core of neurosis and culture. Rank also questioned classical analytic technique, which in his view reduced emotional life to a derivative of sexuality. Together with Sándor Ferenczi he advocated a more direct, lived relationship between analyst and patient. The break with Freud became final, and Rank resigned his posts in the society, the publishing house and the journals.

From 1926 he divided his time between Paris and the United States, where he lectured and practised as a therapist. In New York he developed a practice centred on the relationship, the will and the patient's creativity, and he supported a model of time-limited therapy. His ideas influenced social work, Carl Rogers's client-centred therapy, Gestalt therapy and humanistic psychology. He died in New York in 1939, the same year as Freud. Today his legacy is most visible in relational psychotherapy and in the debate over the place of emotion in psychoanalysis.