International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis | Rank (Rosenfeld), Otto (1884-1939)

Otto Rosenfield Rank, an Austrian psychologist and psychoanalyst, was born on April, 22, 1884, in Vienna and died on October 31, 1939, in New York.

He was the son of Simon Rosenfeld, an artisan jeweler, and Karoline Fleischner. His older brother studied law while Otto became a locksmith: the family could not afford higher education for both. Close to his mother but alienated from his alcoholic father, Otto adopted the name "Rank" in adolescence and formalized it a few years later, symbolizing self-creation, a central theme of his life and work.

Of Jewish background, growing up in Catholic Vienna, Rank was a religious skeptic who wrote his own Ten Commandments, among them "Thou shalt not give birth reluctantly." He read deeply in philosophy and literature, loved music, and considered himself an artist, writing poetry and a literary diary. Before he was 21, he read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1900). He applied psychoanalytic ideas in an essay on the artist; the manuscript came to Freud (probably through Alfred Adler, Rank's physician) which led to Rank's appointment as secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1906. With Freud's financial and moral support, Rank obtained his PhD from the University of Vienna in 1912, the first candidate to do so with a psychoanalytic thesis subject.

Rank became the acknowledged expert on philosophy, literature, and myth in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and kept the minutes (1906-1918; later published in four volumes). He became the most prolific psychoanalytic writer after Freud, with Der Künstler (1907; expanded editions 1918 and 1925), Der Mythus der Geburt des Heldens (1909), Die Lohengrin Sage [his doctoral thesis] (1911), and Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage (1912, 2nd edition 1926), a 700-page survey of world literature. Except for the posthumous Beyond Psychology (1941), Rank's books were written in his native German. Translations, mostly of his early psychoanalytic works, exist in English, French, Italian, and Spanish.

Other works important in Rank's Freudian period include "Ein Beitrag zum Narcissismus" (Jarbuch, 1911), Die Bedeutung der Psychoanalyse für die Geisteswissenschaften (1912, with H. Sachs), Psychoanalytische Beitrage zur Mythenforschung (1919), Die Don Juan Gestalt (1922), Der Doppelgänger (1925), Eine Neurosenanalyse in Traumen (1924), SexualitätundSchuldgefühl (1926), Technik der Psychoanalyse (I. Die Analytische Situation, 1926; II. Die Analytische Reaktion, 1929; III. Die Analyse Des Analytikers, 1931; II and III translated as Will Therapy, 1936), Grundzüge einer genetischen Psychologie (I. Genetische Psychologie, 1927, II. Gestaltung und Ausdruck der Personlichkeit, 1928; III. Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit, 1929, translated as Truth and Reality, 1936).

Rank was a member of Freud's Committee, or "Ring" of Seven and his closest associates (1906-1925). Of the founders of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Rank was closest to Freud geographically, professionally, and personally. He helped edit and contributed two chapters to Freud's Die Traumdeutung (editions 4-7, 1914-1922; "Traum und Dichtung" and "Traum und Mythus"). He and Hanns Sachs edited the journal Imago, beginning in 1912, with Freud and Sándor Ferenczi he edited Die Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse beginning in 1913. Rank witnessed the vicissitudes and bitter endings of Freud's relationships with Wilhelm Stekel, Alfred Adler, and Carl Jung; Rank's tenure with Freud lasted much longer—two decades, exceeded only by that of his friend Sándor Ferenczi and his foe Ernest Jones.

Freud, who had discouraged young Rank from pursuing a medical career, after 1912 always addressed him as "Dr. Rank" and referred patients to him. This was consistent with his support of non-medical or "lay" analysis. Freud and Rank agreed on another controversial issue: the eligibility of homosexual candidates for analytic training.

Rank served in the Austrian army in Poland during World War I, where he met and married Beata "Tola" Mincer in 1918; she became a noted lay analyst and practiced in Boston after their separation in 1934. The birth of their only child, Helene (1919), enhanced Rank's interest in the pre-oedipal phase of development (birth to age 3) and the mother-child relationship.

He was co-founder of the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1910, honorary member of the American Psychoanalitic Association (1924-1930). Freud and Rank established the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag in 1919, which became Rank's major responsibility along with training psychoanalytic candidates from around the world. In 1924 Rank published Das Trauma der Geburt, emphasizing the importance of separation and individuation, with their attendant and inevitable anxiety in the pre-oedipal period. Until then psychoanalysis had been father-centered, with oedipal conflict at the center. Rank meant only to balance and extend Freud's work but this book, and his work with Ferenczi on active therapy—Entzwicklungsziele der Psychoanalyse (1924)—led to a final break with his mentor and virtual foster father. That same year Rank turned 40 and visited the United States for the first time. He was honored as Freud's emissary, although his ideas were beginning to challenge established Freudian doctrine.

Over the next decade Rank lectured, taught, wrote, and practiced a briefer form of psychoanalytic therapy with a more egalitarian relationship between therapist and patient. Rank modified the open-ended analytic process by using termination as the focus for separation and independent development. In this respect his work anticipated the innovations of Franz Alexander (brief analytic therapy, and the corrective emotional experience).

Orthodox Freudians condemned Rank as a deviant. The American Psychoanalytic Association expelled him and required his former analysands to undergo re-analysis. Although Rank suffered from poor physical health and occasional depression, assertions that his departure from the psychoanalytic fold were a result of mental instability (by Ernest Jones and A. A. Brill) are not supportable. The work of Rank and his colleague, Ferenczi, is being studied and discussed more objectively by psychoanalytic scholars in the twenty-first century.

Rank's creativity continued to flourish in his post-Freudian period. Between 1926 and 1931 he wrote major works on developmental psychology and therapeutic technique which are considered forerunners of object relations theory and ego psychology (Rudnytsky, 1991). He emphasized conscious experience, the present, choice, responsibility, and action, in contrast with the (classical Freudian) unconscious, past history, drives, determinism, and intellectual insight. Seelenglaube und Psychologie (1930) and Art and Artist (1932) are psychoanalytically informed major works of social psychology and cultural history addressing religion and creativity, respectively.

Rank's emphasis on will, relationship, and creativity appealed to psychologists Rollo May, Carl Rogers, Esther Menaker, Paul Goodman, and Henry Murray. Noted psychiatrists influenced by Rank include Frederick Allen, Marion Kenworthy, Robert Jay Lifton, Carl Whitaker, and Irvin Yalom; writers and critics include Ernest Becker, Maxwell Geismar, Max Lerner, Ludwig Lewisohn, Anaïs Nin, Carl Rakosi, and Miriam Waddington.

Some of Rank's ideas which seemed radical in his time have become the mainstream of psychoanalytic thought: the importance of the early mother-child relationship; the ego, consciousness, the here-and-now, and the actual relationship—as opposed to transference—in therapy. He anticipated and influenced interpersonal, existential, client-centered, Gestalt, and relationship therapies. As a social psychologist he contributed to our understanding of myth, religion, art, education, ethics, and organizational behavior.

Rank's companion in the last four years of his life was Estelle Buel, an American of Swiss descent whom he married just three months before his death. He had applied for United States citizenship when a kidney infection led to fatal septicemia; he died in New York City at 55.

The Butler Library at Columbia University in New York holds the Otto Rank papers in its rare book and manuscript collections. The Journal of the Otto Rank Association appeared twice annually from 1966 to 1983, publishing works by Rank and many others who knew him or his writings. A collection of his American lectures (1924-1938) has been published as A Psychology of Difference (Robert Kramer, Ed., 1996).

E. JAMES LIEBERMAN

Works discussed: Development of Psycho-Analysis; Don Juan and The Double; Myth of the Birth of the Hero, The; Trauma of Birth, The.

See also: Applied psychoanalysis and interactions of psychoanalysis; Birth; Castration complex; Double, the; First World War: The effect on the development of psychoanalysis; Gesammelte Schriften; Imago. Zeitschrift für die Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geisteswissenschaften; Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety; Internationale Zeitschrift für (ärztliche) Psychoanalyse; Internationaler Psychoanalitscher Verlag; "Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy"; Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society; Myth of the hero; Narcissism; Narcissism, primary; Neutrality/benevolent neutrality; New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis; Nin, Anaïs; Secret Committee, the; Signal anxiety; Splits in psychoanalysis; Termination of treatment; Technique with adults, psychoanalytic; Training analysis; Visual arts and psychoanalysis; Wiener psychoanalytische Vereinigung.