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Born: April 22, 1884, Vienna; Died: October 30, 1939, New York.
Ph.D., University of Vienna, 1912. Co-editor, Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse and Imago. Secretary, Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.
Born Otto Rosenfeld, second son of an artisan jeweler in a working class Jewish section of Vienna, Rank took his last name from a character in Doll’s House by Ibsen, a favorite playwright. His older brother became a lawyer; Otto became a locksmith as his parents could not support higher education for him. A self-educated polymath, he read Sigmund Freud’s works, kept a literary-philosophical diary, and wrote a psychoanalytic essay on the artist published in 1907 at age 23. By then, he was secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and kept the Minutes from 1906–1916 (four volumes, published 1961–1975). Freud funded Rank’s education through academic high school and the University of Vienna (Ph.D. thesis on Lohengrin, 1912). With a small book The Myth of the Birth...
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References
Lieberman, E. J. (1985). Acts of will: the life and work of Otto Rank. New York: Free Press (Simon & Schuster). Paperback ed. 1993, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. French trans. 1991, Paris: PUF. German trans. 1997, Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag.
Menaker, E. (1982). Otto Rank: A rediscovered legacy. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rank, O. (1996). A psychology of difference: The American lectures (R. Kramer Ed.) Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Taft, J. (1958). Otto Rank. New York: Julian Press.
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Lieberman, E.J. (2012). Rank, Otto. In: Rieber, R.W. (eds) Encyclopedia of the History of Psychological Theories. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0463-8_138
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