Editing Otto Rank (section)

== In the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society ==
{{Moresources|section|date=July 2023}}
Rank was born in 1884 as '''Otto Rosenfeld''', the son of a [[Jewish]] craftsman in Vienna. In 1905, at the age of 21, he so impressed Freud with a study that he invited Rank to become Secretary of the emerging [[Vienna Psychoanalytic Society]]. 

Rank thus became the first paid member of the psychoanalytic movement, and Freud's "right-hand man" for almost 20 years. Freud considered Rank, with whom he was more intimate intellectually than his own sons, to be the most brilliant of his Viennese disciples.

Encouraged and supported by Freud, Rank completed the "Gymnasium" or college-preparatory high school, attended the University of Vienna, and was awarded his PhD in literature in 1912. His thesis, on the [[Lohengrin]] saga, was published in 1911, the first Freudian doctoral dissertation to be published as a book.

Rank was one of Freud's six collaborators brought together in a secret "committee" or "[[inner circle (psychoanalysis)|ring]]" to defend the psychoanalytic mainstream as disputes with [[Alfred Adler]] and [[Carl Jung]] developed. Rank was the most prolific author in the "ring" besides Freud himself, extending [[psychoanalytic theory]] to the study of [[legend]], [[mythology|myth]], art, creativity and ''[[Doppelgänger|The Double]]'' ("Doppelgänger").<ref>Klein, Naomi. 2024. ''Doppelganger.'' Vintage Canada, p.55-56</ref> 

He worked closely with Freud, contributing two chapters on myth and legend to Freud's key monograph ''[[The Interpretation of Dreams]]''. Rank's name appeared underneath Freud's on the title page of Freud's greatest work from 1914 until 1930. Between 1915 and 1918, Rank served as Secretary of the [[International Psychoanalytical Association]] which Freud had founded in 1910. Everyone in the small psychoanalytic world understood how much Freud respected Rank and his prolific creativity in expanding psychoanalytic theory. Freud announced to his inner circle, full of jealous rivals, that Rank was "my heir."<ref>Lieberman and Kramer, 2012, p. 225.</ref>

In 1924, Rank published ''Das Trauma der Geburt'' (translated into English as ''[[The Trauma of Birth]]'' in 1929), exploring how art, myth, religion, philosophy and therapy were illuminated by [[separation anxiety disorder|separation anxiety]] in the "phase before the development of the Oedipus complex."<ref>Lieberman and Kramer, 2012, p. 216.</ref> But there was no such phase in Freud's theories.<ref>Kramer, 2019.</ref> The [[Oedipus complex]], Freud explained, was the nucleus of the [[neurosis]] and the foundational source of all art, myth, religion, philosophy, therapy – indeed of all human culture and civilization. It was the first time that anyone in the inner circle had dared to suggest that the Oedipus complex might not be the supreme causal factor in psychoanalysis. Rank coined the term "pre-Oedipal" in a public psychoanalytic forum in 1925.<ref>Rank, 1996, p. 43.</ref> In a 1930 self-analysis of his own writings, Rank observes that "the pre-Oedipal super-ego has since been overemphasized by [[Melanie Klein]], without any reference to me."<ref>Rank 1996, p. 149n.</ref>

After some hesitation, Freud distanced himself from ''The Trauma of Birth,'' signaling to other members of his inner circle that Rank was perilously close to anti-Oedipal heresy. "I am boiling with rage," Freud told [[Sándor Ferenczi]], then Rank's best friend (Kramer, 2015). Confronted with Freud's decisive opposition, Rank resigned in protest from his positions as Vice-President of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, director of Freud's publishing house, and co-editor of ''Imago'' and ''Zeitschrift''. 

Ferenczi, with whom Rank had collaborated from 1920 through 1924 on new experiential, object-relational and "here-and-now" approaches to therapy, vacillated on the significance of Rank's pre-Oedipal theory but not on Rank's objections to classical analytic technique.

The recommendation in Freud's technical papers for analysts to be emotionless, according to Ferenczi and Rank (1924), had led to "an unnatural elimination of all human factors in the analysis" (pp. 40–41), and to "a theorizing of experience [''Erlebnis'']" (p. 41): the feeling experience of the intersubjective relationship, two first-person experiences, within the analytic situation. 

According to [[Sandor Rado]], an influential analyst in New York who helped found the psychoanalytic center at Columbia University, "The characteristic of that time was a neglect of a human being's emotional life ... Everybody was looking for oral, pregenital, and genital components in motivation. But that some people are happy, others unhappy, some afraid, or full of anger, and some loving and affectionate – read the case histories to find how such differences between people were then absent from the literature." (Roazen & Swerdloff, 1995, pp. 82–83)

All emotional experience by human beings was being reduced by analysis to a derivative, no matter how disguised, of libido. For Freud, emotion was always sexual, derived from a dangerous Id that must be surgically uprooted: "Where Id was [''Wo es war'']," Freud said famously, "there ego shall be [''soll ich werden'']" (S.E., 22:80).

"Libido," according to Freud's 1921 work on ''[[Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego]]'' (S.E., 18: 90), "is an expression taken from the theory of the emotions." Emotion is the cause of neurotic disorder. Increases in emotion, according to Freud, are unpleasurable. Cure, for Freud, means analyzing, "working through" and eventually uprooting the [[emotions]] of the patient, "like the draining of the Zuyder Zee" (Freud, S.E., 22:80). The analyst makes the unconscious conscious by providing cognitive insight to the patient, thereby subduing the pressing drive for the irrational, for emotions – for the Id – to emerge from the patient's unconscious (Kramer, 2019, pp. 45–48).
[[File:Freud and other psychoanalysts 1922.jpg|right|upright=1.2|thumb|Left to right, seated: [[Sigmund Freud]], [[Sándor Ferenczi]], and [[Hanns Sachs]]. Standing: Otto Rank, [[Karl Abraham]], [[Max Eitingon]], and [[Ernest Jones]]. Photo 1922]]

In a 1927 lecture, Rank (1996) observes that "surgical therapy is uprooting and isolates the individual emotionally, as it tries to deny the emotional life" (p. 169), the same attack he and Ferenczi had leveled against psychoanalytic practice in their joint work. Reducing all emotional experience—all feeling, loving, thinking, and willing—to sex was one of Freud's biggest mistakes, according to Rank, who first pointed out this confusion in the mid-twenties. Emotions, said Rank, are relationships. Denial of the emotional life leads to denial of the will, the creative life, as well as denial of the interpersonal relationship in the analytic situation (Rank, 1929–31).

For Freud, said Rank in ''Will Therapy'' (1929–31), "the emotional life develops from the sexual sphere, therefore his sexualization in reality means emotionalization" (p. 165), two experiences that psychoanalysts continued to conflate for half a century after Freud's death. Psychoanalysis had no theory of emotional experience and, by extension, no theory of [[emotional intelligence]]. Weinstein (2001) identified over two dozen articles in the major psychoanalytic journals criticizing the incomplete and confused theory of emotions in psychoanalysis. {{nowrap|"[S]uch}} comments persisted through to the 1990s" (Weinstein, 2001, p. 40).

"The emotional impoverishment of psychoanalysis," wrote Ernest Becker (1973) in ''The Denial of Death'', which was strongly influenced by Rank's ideas, "must extend also to many analysts themselves and to psychiatrists who come under its ideology. This fact helps explain the terrible deadness of emotion that one experiences in psychiatric settings, the heavy weight of the character armor erected against the world" (p. 195n).

Written privately in 1932, Ferenczi's ''Clinical Diary'' identified the "personal causes for the erroneous development of psychoanalysis" (Ferenczi, 1995, p. 184). 

According to Ferenczi, "… One learned from [Freud] and from his kind of technique various things that made one's life and work more comfortable: the calm, unemotional reserve; the unruffled assurance that one knows better; and the theories, the seeking and finding of the causes of failure in the patient instead of partly in ourselves … and finally the pessimistic view, shared only with a few, that neurotics are a rabble [''Gesindel''], good only to support us financially and to allow us to learn from their cases: psychoanalysis as a therapy may be worthless" (Ferenczi, 1995, pp.&nbsp;185–186).

After Freud turned against Rank, Ferenczi publicly rejected ''The Trauma of Birth'', shunning Rank during a chance meeting in 1926 at Penn Station in New York. "He was my best friend and he refused to speak to me," Rank said (Taft, 1958, p. xvi).

Ferenczi's rupture with Rank cut short radical innovations in practice, and left no one in the inner circle who would champion relational, pre-Oedipal or "here-and-now" psychotherapy. Classical psychoanalysis, along the lines of Freud's 1911–15 technical writings, would now be entrenched in training institutes around the world. The attack leveled in 1924 by Ferenczi and Rank on the increasing "fanaticism for interpretation" and the "unnatural elimination of all human factors" from the practice of analysis would be forgotten (Kramer, 2019, p. 19).

Relational, expressive and "here-and-now" therapy would not be acceptable to most members of the [[American Psychoanalytic Association]] or the [[International Psychoanalytic Association]] for half a century. "[T]hose who had the misfortune to be analyzed by [Rank] were required to undergo a ''second'' analysis in order to qualify" for membership in the American Psychoanalytic Association (Lieberman, 1985, p. 293).