Otto Rank 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 of Freud's secret society since 1905 and worked with him until 1924. He was editor of two major journals on psychoanalysis and was also 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 estrangement from Freud began when in his work The trauma of birth (1929) where he displaced the central function of Freud's Oedipus Complex by anguish Of birth.
Family life of Otto Rank
Otto Rank, of real name Otto Rosenfeld, was born the 22 of April of 1884 in the city of Vienna, in Austria. He died on October 31, 1939, in New York, United States. Rank was raised 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 well with his father, since he was alcoholic And very violent. It is also said that during his childhood, the psychoanalyst suffered an attempt of sexual abuse, not by his father but by a person close to him. These problems, in addition to generating symptoms of neurosis In their adult life, are also believed to have been the root of their Phobia of germs and to the 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's self-esteem problems. He felt like an ungraceful child, and he also had rheumatism.
Rank was always passionate about studies. Therefore, despite his problems, in his school days always performed well. However, at the age of 14 he was changed to a technical school against his will. The training in this institution would be to prepare him work, since his destiny was to work in factories.
At this time he lived very frustrated because it was far from his real interest that were the books. Nevertheless, he tried to combine his work with his passion. So while he was an apprentice turner, he learned both literature and philosophy and became an amateur of Nietzsche .
By 1903 he decided to completely disassociate himself from his father. Therefore, it changed its surname to Rank, which took of a personage of the work The house of the dolls from Henrik Ibsen , one of the Best contemporary writers . In addition, he left Judaism and converted to Catholicism to legalize his new name. However, years later, before marrying, he resumed his Jewish roots.
The beginning of his career
By 1904, Rank became interested in psychoanalysis. Until that time he had had a self-taught formation. He was very intelligent and had a great desire for knowledge. That year he read The interpretation of dreams from 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 Psychological Society on Wednesday, which included 17 psychoanalysts, including physicians and laymen, a term employed by Freud for non-physicians. Rank's job was to collect dues and record written discussions of those meetings.
Otto Rank, top left, poses with other psychoanalysts of the time
Thanks to Freud's support, 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 as The artist , The reason for incest in poetry And the legend Y The myth of the birth of the hero . The latter was a work in which he applied Sigmund Freud's analytical techniques 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 journal of psychoanalysis Imago . It was a publication that specialized in the application of psychoanalysis to art.
Its founders chose the name of Imago In honor of a novel of the same name Carl Spitteler , A Swiss poet. At first, the magazine had numerous 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.
In 1915, Rank was forced to serve as editor of a Krakow newspaper, called Krakauer Zeitung , for two years. This event caused a great deal of depression . However, it was at that time that he met Beata Mincer, who three years later would become his wife.
Mincer, later known as Tola Rank, was a student of psychology who later became a psychoanalyst. The couple married in 1918. On the other hand, because of their depressive states, which used to be accompanied by states of exaltation, Rank was cataloged by his colleagues as manic-depressive psychotic.
In 1919, the psychoanalyst founded the publisher Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag (International Psychoanalytic Editorial), which he directed until 1924, being that same year when also ceased his work as secretary of the Psychoanalytic Association of Vienna.
At that time, Rank had been practicing for years as a psychoanalyst. He had also been co-editor, along with Ernest Jones , of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis (International Journal of Psychoanalysis).
In late 1923, Rank published The trauma of birth . This work is part of an idea of the same Freud, 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 experienced by the human being. And that therefore, the act of being born was the source of this.
Otto Rank devoted himself to developing this theory widely. But in postulating that the anguish of separation occurred at the time of birth, he opposed the theory of Oedipus complex Of Freud.
In this way, his ideas began to distance himself from those of his mentor and the whole field of psychoanalysis at that time. For 1924 he gave lectures in the United States and came in contact with the Psychoanalytic Society of New York. Rank became an honorary member of this institution until 1930.
In 1926, the Austrian psychoanalyst worked with Sándor Ferenczi In 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 conscious and the will of the person. This work alienated him even more from Freudian theories, which emphasized the unconscious and repression. For Rank the consciousness and expression of the Self was more important.
That same year, the psychoanalyst moved to Paris with his wife and daughter. There, in addition to giving therapy, he used to lecture. In 1930, psychoanalysts were expelled by the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). Thus he became independent and progressively detached himself from the psychoanalytic movement.
In 1935 he settled definitively in the United States, specifically in New York, where he continued his work as a psychotherapist. He died in 1939 as a result of a serious infection. His death occurred a month after the death of Sigmund Freud.
The Theories of Otto Rank
Otto Rank was one of the most important followers of psychoanalytic thinking. However, time later he became a dissident of Freudian theories, as he did not share some of his basic principles.
The first works of Rank were well received by the psychoanalytic movement. However, although little by little he had been giving clues as to where his ideas were going, he went with The trauma of birth With which 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 was developed in four phases which he called familiar, social, artistic and spiritual.
One of the most interesting theories proposed by Rank was exposed in his work The artist . In this work the author focused on the subject of artistic creativity, focusing on the aspect of the will. The psychoanalyst asserted that all people are born with a will that leads them to free themselves from any domination.
According to the specialist, in childhood practice the will to become independent of our parents. And later this is reflected when we face the domination of another type of authorities. Rank asserted 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.
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, most people fall into this category.
The second, the neurotic type, are people with greater will. The problem is that they must deal with a constant struggle between the external and the internal. They often feel preoccupied and guilty about having what they believe to be unwilling. However, for Rank these subjects have a much greater moral development than the first type.
The third is the productive type, and is the one that the author has called as the artist, the creative, the genius and the type that is self-conscious. This type of person does not face himself but is accepted. That is, they are individuals who work on themselves and then try to create a different world.
Postulates of The trauma of birth , The work that moved him away from Freud's psychoanalysis
Rank proposed several theories, but it was not these ideas that moved 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 the psychoanalyst movement of Sigmund Freud.
And it is that 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, attaching greater importance to the present of the individual 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 the mental development of people. During this experience, the human being suffers a first anguish, which happens long before other situations such as weaning, castration and sexuality. So in The trauma of birth , Rank basically exposes that the first trauma suffered by the human being occurs at birth and that the aspiration of this is to return to the maternal uterus.
It is worth mentioning that this work was well received at first by Freud. However, as it was found that in this the importance of the Oedipus Complex was diminished, the controversy arose. This was one of the most regrettable ruptures within the circle of psychoanalysts.
After this, the psychoanalytic movement became unbalanced and divided into two axes, which was led by Ernst Jones and Karl Abraham and led by Otto Rank and Sándor Ferenczi. Rank was never considered anti-Freudian, and in fact Freud later came to accept some of the postulates of his former disciple.