OTTO RANK: BIOGRAPHY AND THEORIES - PSYCHOLOGY - 2025

Otto Rank (1884-1939) was an Austrian psychoanalyst and psychotherapist, one of the first disciples of Sigmund Freud, with whom he worked for 20 years. Rank's work was especially known for having extended psychoanalysis to the field of psychosis.

He served as secretary to Freud's secret society from 1905 and worked with him until 1924. He was the editor of two major psychoanalytic journals and also served as a teacher and writer.

He published several works that were praised by the psychoanalytic movement, such as The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, published in 1909. However, his distancing from Freud began when in his work The Trauma of Birth (1929) he displaced the central function of the complex of Freud's Oedipus for the anguish of birth.

Early years

Otto Rank, real name Otto Rosenfeld, was born on April 22, 1884 in the city of Vienna, Austria. He died on October 31, 1939, in New York, United States. Rank grew up in a dysfunctional family. His parents were Karoline Fleischner and Simon Rosenfeld, both Jews. He had two brothers, both older than him.

Rank never got along with his father, as he was an alcoholic and very violent. Additionally, it is said that during his childhood, the psychoanalyst suffered an attempt of sexual abuse, not by his father but by a close person.

These problems, in addition to generating symptoms of neurosis in his adult life, are also believed to be the root of his phobia of germs and sexual relations.

On the other hand, this trauma in his childhood served Freud to dismiss his theories about the role of the father in his work The trauma of birth. This environment of family violence also brought Rank problems with self-esteem. He felt like an unattractive child and also suffered from rheumatism.

Studies

Rank was always passionate about studies. Therefore, despite his problems, in his school days he always performed well. However, at age 14 he was transferred to a technical school against his will. Training in this institution would be to prepare him for work, since his destiny was to work in factories.

At this time he was very frustrated because he was far from his real interest, which was books. However, he tried to combine his work with his passion. So while he was an apprentice to a turner, he trained in both literature and philosophy and became a fan of Nietzsche.

Change of surname

In 1903 he decided to completely disassociate himself from his father. For this reason, he changed his surname to Rank, which he took from a character in the play The Doll House by Henrik Ibsen, one of the best contemporary writers.

Furthermore, he left Judaism and converted to Catholicism to legalize his new name. However, years later, before marrying, she returned to her Jewish roots.

The start of his career

In 1904, Rank became interested in psychoanalysis. Until then he had had a self-taught training. He was very intelligent and had a great desire for knowledge. That year he read The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud and in 1905 he met the father of psychoanalysis.

Rank became one of Freud's favorite pupils. In 1906 he was hired as the secretary of the so-called Wednesday Psychological Society, which included 17 psychoanalysts, including physicians and laymen, a term used by Freud for non-physicians. Rank's job was to collect the fees and record the discussions at those meetings in writing.

Otto Rank, top left, poses with other psychoanalysts of the time

Thanks to the support of Freud, Rank began his university studies in 1908. He studied philosophy, Germanic disciplines and classical languages ​​in Vienna.

In 1912 he obtained his doctorate. By that time he had already published several literary works such as The Artist, The Incest Motive in Poetry and Legend, and The Myth of the Birth of the Hero.

The latter was a work in which he applied the analytical techniques of Sigmund Freud to the interpretation of myths. This work became a classic of psychoanalytic literature.

Your work as a psychoanalyst

After graduating in 1912, Rank, in association with Hanns Sachs, founded the international psychoanalytic journal Imago. It was a publication that specialized in the application of psychoanalysis to art.

Its founders chose the name Imago in honor of a novel of the same name by Carl Spitteler, a Swiss poet. Initially, the magazine had many subscribers in Germany, but in Vienna there were few. Freud was in charge of supervising Rank and Sachs in this work and even sent them some articles.

Military service

In 1915, Rank was forced to serve in the military as editor of a Krakow newspaper, called Krakauer Zeitung, for two years. This event caused him a great depression. However, it was around this time that he met Beata Mincer, who three years later would become his wife.

Wedding

Mincer, later known as Tola Rank, was a psychology student who later became a psychoanalyst. The couple married in 1918. On the other hand, due to his depressive states, which were often accompanied by states of exaltation, Rank was classified by his colleagues as a psychotic manic-depressive.

Editorial Foundation

In 1919, the psychoanalyst founded the publishing house Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag (International Psychoanalytic Editorial), which he directed until 1924, being that same year when he also ceased his work as secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association.

At that time, Rank had already been a psychoanalyst for years. He had also been co-editor, with Ernest Jones, of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis (International Journal of Psychoanalysis).

The trauma of birth

In late 1923, Rank published The Trauma of Birth. This work is based on an idea by Freud himself, who had included it in a footnote in the revised edition of his book The Interpretation of Dreams in 1909. The father of psychoanalysis said that birth was the first experience of anguish that the human being experienced. And that therefore, the act of being born was the source of this.

Otto Rank devoted himself to developing this theory extensively. But by postulating that separation anxiety occurred at birth, he opposed Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex.

In this way, his ideas began to distance themselves from those of his mentor and from the entire field of psychoanalysis at that time. In 1924 he gave lectures in the United States and came into contact with the New York Psychoanalytic Society. Rank became an honorary member of this institution until 1930.

Active therapy

In 1926, the Austrian psychoanalyst worked with Sándor Ferenczi on a new concept called active therapy. These were short therapies that focused on the present.

In this therapy, the fundamental role for the change of the individual was the consciousness and the will of the person. This work took him further away from Freudian theories, which emphasized the unconscious and repression. For Rank, consciousness and expression of the Self was more important.

Paris

That same year, the psychoanalyst moved to Paris with his wife and daughter. There, in addition to giving therapy, he used to give lectures. In 1930, the psychoanalysts expelled him from the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). Thus he became independent and progressively detached himself from the psychoanalytic movement.

U.S

In 1935 he settled permanently in the United States, specifically in New York, where he continued his work as a psychotherapist. She died in 1939 as a result of a serious infection. Her death occurred a month after the death of Sigmund Freud.

Otto Rank's theories

Otto Rank was one of the most important followers of psychoanalytic thought. However, some time later he became a dissident of Freudian theories, since he did not share some of their basic principles.

Rank's early works were very well received by the psychoanalytic movement. However, although little by little he had been giving clues as to where his ideas were heading, it was with The Trauma of Birth that he finally moved away from Freud's psychoanalysis.

For Rank, psychotherapy was not so much an intellectual change but rather an emotional change, which also occurred in the present. He also conceived the personality as a complete unit, which developed in four phases which he called family, social, artistic and spiritual.

Will of liberation

One of the most interesting theories proposed by Rank was exposed in his work The Artist. In this work, the author devoted himself to the subject of artistic creativity, focusing on the aspect of the will. The psychoanalyst claimed that all people are born with a will that leads them to free themselves from any domination.

According to Rank, in childhood the will to become independent from our parents is practiced, and later this is reflected when we face the domination of other types of authorities. Rank stated that each person struggles with this in a different way and that depending on how they do it determines the type of people they will be.

Types of people

Rank described three basic types of people: the adapted, the neurotic, and the productive. The first corresponds to the type of people to whom a "will" has been imposed. It must obey authority, as well as a moral and social code. These people are classified as passive and directed. According to the author, the majority of people fall into this category.

The second, the neurotic type, are people with a greater will. The problem is that they must deal with a constant struggle between the external and the internal. They tend to feel worried and guilty of having what they think is little will. However, for Rank these subjects have a much higher moral development than the first type.

The third is the productive type, and it is what the author has called the artist, the creative, the genius, and the self-conscious type. This type of person does not face himself but accepts himself. That is, they are individuals who work on themselves and then try to create a different world.

Postulates of

Rank proposed various theories, but it was not these ideas that led him away from Freud's psychoanalysis. It was his work The Trauma of Birth (1923) that would put Rank in a position that would never be accepted by Sigmund Freud's psychoanalyst movement.

In this work, the psychoanalyst attributed the development of neurosis, not to the Oedipus complex, but to the trauma experienced during birth. According to Rank, this is the most intense experience in a person's life, giving greater importance to the individual's present and not to his past. He also proposed that it was necessary to take into account the social environment in which it developed.

Rank stated that the anguish experienced at birth plays a determining role in people's mental development. During this experience, the human being suffers a first anguish, which happens long before other situations such as weaning, castration and sexuality.

Thus, in The Trauma of Birth, Rank basically states that the first trauma suffered by the human being occurs at birth and that the aspiration of this is to return to the mother's womb.

It is worth noting that this work was initially well received by Freud. However, when it was found that in this the importance of the Oedipus Complex was diminished, controversy arose. Thus occurred one of the most regrettable ruptures within the circle of psychoanalysts.

After this, the psychoanalytic movement became unbalanced and divided into two axes, the one led by Ernst Jones and Karl Abraham and the one led by Otto Rank and Sándor Ferenczi. Rank never considered himself anti-Freudian, and indeed Freud later came to accept some of the postulates of his former disciple.