Otto Rank (; ; né Rosenfeld; 22 April 1884 – 31 October 1939) was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, and philosopher. Born in Vienna, he became one of Sigmund Freud's closest collaborators, served as secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and edited leading psychoanalytic journals while publishing studies of myth and creativity.
Early life and Freud's circle
Rank was born Otto Rosenfeld in 1884 to a Jewish artisan family in Vienna. He impressed Freud in 1905 with a study of the Lohengrin legend, which led to Rank's appointment as secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and the movement's first salaried post.
Encouraged by Freud, Rank completed gymnasium later in life, earned a doctorate in literature from the University of Vienna in 1912, and published his thesis on the Lohengrin saga as the first Freudian dissertation issued as a book.
He joined Freud's confidential "committee" to defend psychoanalysis, served as managing director of the movement's publishing house, and helped edit
Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse and
Imago.
Rank extended psychoanalytic interpretation to legend, myth, and art, culminating in works such as
The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and
The Double.
Career
The Trauma of Birth and break with Freud
Rank published
Das Trauma der Geburt in 1924, arguing that the shock of separation at birth shapes art, myth, religion, and therapy before the Oedipus complex forms.
The book proposed a pre-Oedipal stage and challenged Freud's view that the Oedipus complex is the nucleus of neurosis and culture.
Freud maintained that libido organized emotion and likened analytic work to "the draining of the Zuyder Zee," whereas Rank centered change on the relational experience of separation anxiety.
In a 1930 self-analysis Rank observed that the "pre-Oedipal super-ego" had been emphasized by
Melanie Klein without crediting his priority.
Therapeutic innovations
Between 1920 and 1924 Rank collaborated with Sándor Ferenczi on approaches that favored immediacy and emotional reciprocity in the consulting room.
They warned that Freud's technical recommendations produced "an unnatural elimination of all human factors in the analysis" and called for therapy grounded in lived experience.
Analysts such as
Sandor Rado later recalled how training minimized patients' emotional lives and focused on classifying drives, a tendency Rank viewed as a distortion of psychoanalysis' human potential.
Freud described libido as the engine of emotion and likened the analytic task to draining primitive feeling from the patient, reinforcing distance over relationship.
Rank countered that emotions are relational and that therapy should cultivate the creative will rather than uproot feeling.
Later life and influence
Rank left Vienna in 1926 and divided his time between Paris and the United States, where he lectured, practiced psychotherapy, and continued to write on art, myth, and the will.
He died of a kidney infection in New York City on 31 October 1939, reportedly remarking "Komisch" on his deathbed.
Rank's relationship-centered therapy informed Jessie Taft and Frederick Allen, who developed the functional model at the Pennsylvania School of Social Work and introduced Rank's ideas to Carl Rogers.
Summary of core ideas
Therapeutic philosophy
Rank interpreted psychotherapy as a collaborative process of learning and unlearning that keeps emotional experience at the center. He argued that the therapeutic relationship lets people discover more creative ways to think, feel, and act in the present while releasing patterns that have turned destructive, treating neurosis as a failure of creativity rather than a retreat from sexuality.
Rank reframed resistance as a creative function. He defined counterwill as a positive force that protects integrity, supports individuation, and helps clients discover the capacity for willing.
Creativity and growth
For Rank, creative figures such as
Rembrandt,
Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci model the courage to move beyond prior achievements. He praised their willingness to reach "beyond the ideology which they have themselves fostered," treating self renewal as the measure of greatness.
He likened unlearning to the labor of birth, insisting that lasting creativity depends on the ability to separate from internalized institutions, beliefs, and fears.
Organizational applications
Rank's exploration of creativity continues to shape
action learning, an inquiry driven method for problem solving, leadership development, and organizational learning.
Drawing on
Art and Artist, action learning coaches help teams create a safe container, pose challenging questions, and "step out of the frame of the prevailing ideology" so members can examine assumptions and reframe their choices.
The process mirrors Rank's view of artistic growth as an ongoing effort to bring new perspectives into being.
In organizational settings, action learning uses these insights to help individuals and teams question deeply held identities, experiment with alternative frames, and practice the skill of unlearning together.
Legacy
Rank's emphasis on will, relationship, and creativity continues to inform modern psychotherapy, organizational practice, and cultural criticism.
Rank anticipated later object-relations perspectives with his 1926 lecture "The Genesis of the Object Relation," which framed development as a lifelong negotiation between individuation and connection.
Ernest Becker drew on Rank's dialectic of "life fear" and "death fear," which later inspired terror management theory experiments by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski.
Major publications
- By date of first publication
|
|
| 1907 | Der Künstler | The Artist |
| 1909 | Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden (Turia & Kant, 2000, ) | The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (Johns Hopkins, 2004, ) |
| 1911 | Die Lohengrin Sage doctoral | The Lohengrin Saga |
| 1912 | Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage | The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend (Johns Hopkins, 1991, ) |
| 1913 | Die Bedeutung der Psychoanalyse fur die Geisteswissenschaften with | The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Human Sciences |
| 1914 | "Traum und Dichtung" and "Traum und Mythus" in Sigmund Freud's Die Traumdeutung | The Interpretation of Dreams eds. 4–7: "Dreams and Poetry"; "Dreams and Myth" added to Ch. VI, "The Dream-Work." In Dreaming by the Book L. Marinelli and A. Mayer, Other, 2003. |
| 1924 | Das Trauma der Geburt (Psychosozial-Verlag, 1998, ) | The Trauma of Birth, 1929 (Dover, 1994, ) |
| 1924 | Entwicklungsziele der Psychoanalyse with | The Development of Psychoanalysis / Developmental Goals of Psychoanalysis |
| 1925 | Der Doppelgänger written | The Double (Karnac, 1989, ) |
| 1927 | Grundzüge einer genetischen Psychologie auf Grund der Psychoanalyse der Ichstruktur, 1. Teil (Leipzig und Wien: Franz Deuticke, 1927) |
| 1928 | Grundzüge einer genetischen Psychologie auf Grund der Psychoanalyse der Ichstruktur, 2. Teil: Gestaltung und Ausdruck der Persönlichkeit (Leipzig und Wien: Franz Deuticke, 1928) |
| 1929 | Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit | Truth and Reality (Norton, 1978, ) |
| 1930 | (Consists of Volumes II and III of "Technik der Psychoanalyse": Vol. II, "Die Analytische Reaktion in ihren konstruktiven Elementen"; Vol. III, "Die Analyse des Analytikers und seiner Rolle in der Gesamtsituaton". Copyright 1929, 1931 by Franz Deuticke.) | Will Therapy, 1929–31 (First published in English in 1936;reprinted in paperback by Norton, 1978, ) |
| 1930 | Seelenglaube und Psychologie | Psychology and the Soul (Johns Hopkins, 2003, ) |
| 1932 | Kunst und Künstler (Psychosozial-Verlag, 2000, ) | Art and Artist (Norton, 1989, ) |
| 1933 | Erziehung und Weltanschauung : Eine Kritik d. psychol. Erziehungs-Ideologie, München: Reinhardt, 1933 | Modern Education |
| 1941 | | Beyond Psychology (Dover, 1966, ) |
| 1996 | | A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures [talks given 1924–1938; edited and with an introductory essay by Robert Kramer (Princeton, 1996, ) |
Notes
Correspondence
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Lieberman, E. James and Robert Kramer (eds.) (2012). The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: Inside Psychoanalysis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. . German ed. "Sigmund Freud und Otto Rank" 2014. French ed., 2015.
Book-length works about Otto Rank.
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Costa, Julio Roberto (2014). To Be More Person: a Reading of Otto Rank. Amazon Digital Services, Inc. .
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Karpf, Fay Berger (1970). The Psychology and Psychotherapy of Otto Rank: An Historical and Comparative Introduction. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. .
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Lieberman, E. James (1985). Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank. Free Press. . Updated ed. University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. French translation: La volonté en acte: La vie et l'œvre d'Otto Rank PUF (1991) ; German translation Otto Rank: Leben und Werk Psychosozial (1997)
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Menaker, Esther (1982). Otto Rank: A Rediscovered Legacy. Columbia University Press.
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Taft, Jessie (1958). Otto Rank: A Biographical Study Based on Notebooks, Letters, Collected Writings, Therapeutic Achievements and Personal Associations. New York: The Julian Press.
Master's thesis on Rank.
Journal series on Rank.
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Journal of the Otto Rank Association Vols. 1 – 17, 31 issues, 1967–1983, diverse writers, including Otto Rank.
Articles or chapters about Otto Rank.
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Kramer, Robert (2015). 'I am Boiling with Rage': Why Did Freud Banish Rank?, an article in Psychoanalyse im Widerspruch, Volume 53, pp. 31–43.
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Kramer, Robert (2012). Otto Rank on Emotional Intelligence, Unlearning and Self-Leadership. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Volume 72, pp. 326–351.
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Kramer, Robert (2006). Otto Rank. Edinburgh International Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis, Ross Skelton (ed.) Edinburgh University Press), p. 389.
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Kramer, Robert (2003). Why Did Ferenczi and Rank Conclude that Freud Had No More Emotional Intelligence than a Pre-Oedipal Child? In Creative Dissent: Psychoanalysis in Evolution, Claude Barbre, Barry Ulanov, and Alan Roland (eds.), Praeger, Ch.3, pp. 23–36.
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Kramer, Robert (1995). The Birth of Client-Centered Therapy: Carl Rogers, Otto Rank, and 'The Beyond,' an article in Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Volume 35, pp. 54–110.
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Kramer, Robert (1995). The 'Bad Mother' Freud Has Never Seen: Otto Rank and the Birth of Object-Relations Theory, an article in Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, Volume 23, pp. 293–321.
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Landy, Robert J. (2008). The Couch and the Stage: Integrating Words and Action in Psychotherapy. Lanham: Jason Aronson, pp. 23–33. .
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Lieberman, E. James. (2003) The Evolution of Psychotherapy Since Freud. In Creative Dissent: Psychoanalysis in Evolution, Claude Barbre, Barry Ulanov, and Alan Roland (eds.), Praeger, Ch. 4, pp. 37–44.
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Roazen, Paul and Bluma Swerdloff (eds.) (1995). Heresy: Sandor Rado and the Psychoanalytic Movement. New Jersey: Jason Aronson. .
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Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine (2008). The Roots of Morality. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 63–91. .
Diary of Sándor Ferenczi.
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The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi (1988), Editor Judith Dupont, Translator Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Jackson, Harvard University Press. .
Articles or chapters on application of Rank's psychoanalysis of art to transformative action learning, leader development and organizational learning.
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Kramer, Robert (2003). Management and Organization Development Through the Lens of Otto Rank and Carl Rogers, Internationale Zeitschrift fűr Sozialpsychologie und Gruppendynamik Vienna,, Vol. 28, pp. 26–43. (In English.)
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Kramer, Robert (2007). How Might Action Learning Be Used to Develop the Emotional Intelligence and Leadership Capacity of Public Administrators? Journal of Public Affairs Education,13 (2), pp. 205–246.
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Kramer, Robert (2008). Learning How to Learn: Action Learning for Leadership Development. A chapter in Rick Morse (ed.) Innovations in Public Leadership Development. Washington DC: M.E. Sharpe and National Academy of Public Administration, pp. 296–326. .
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Kramer, Robert and James Kelly (2010). Transformative Action Learning in the U.S. Government. A chapter in Yuri Boshyk and Robert Dilworth (eds.), Action Learning and Its Applications. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 43–54.
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Kramer, Robert (2012). Otto Rank on Emotional Intelligence, Unlearning and Self-Leadership. American Journal of Psychoanalysis. Volume 72, pp. 326–351.
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Kramer, Robert (2016). From Skillset to Mindset: A New Paradigm for Leader Development. Public Administration Issues, Number 5, pp. 125–142.
Other references.
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Becker, Ernest (1973). The Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press.
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Becker, Ernest (1975). Escape from Evil. New York: The Free Press.
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Kripal, Jeffrey J. (2007). Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. .
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Nin, Anais (1966). The diary of Anaïs Nin: 1931–1934, Volume 1.New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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Weinstein, Fred (2001). Freud, Psychoanalysis, Social Theory: The Unfulfilled Promise. Albany: State University of New York Press.
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Polster, Erving (1968). A Contemporary Psychotherapy. In Paul David Pursglove (ed.) Recognitions in Gestalt Therapy New York: Funk & Wagnalls.
External links
