Rank, Otto

One of Freud’s closest colleagues for 20 years, Rank (1884–1939) was an early and influential member of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society, serving as its secretary and the editor of two journals, the Zeitschrift and Imago. He was also a member of Freud’s innermost circle, the “Ring” committee. Rank was one of the first lay analysts, a point of contention in the early days of psychoanalysis, receiving his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Vienna.

Rank’s eventual break with Freud accompanied the publication of his book The Trauma of Birth, where he traced the genesis of anxiety neurosis to the birth experience. Rank’s claims in this text threatened to subvert Freudian orthodoxy, with suspicious Freudians like Ernest Jones suspecting that Rank was seeking to replace the Oedipal drama with the experience of birth trauma as the central interpretive principle of psychoanalysis. Rank did, at places, call for a reevaluation of the importance of the maternal in psychoanalytic...