RANK, OTTO

RANK, OTTO (original surname – Rosenfeld; 1884–1939), psychoanalyst. Born in Vienna, Rank met freud in 1906 and became a member of his inner circle. Rank edited with H. Sachs the psychoanalytic journal Imago and with S. Ferenczi and E. Jones International Zeitschrift fuer Psychoanalyse (1912–24). He founded and directed the Internationale Psychoanalytische Verlag (1919–24). He had a special flair for interpreting myths, legends, and dreams. His vast erudition was evident in his great work on incest myths, Das Inzest Motiv in Dichtung und Sage (1912). He spent the war years in Cracow. E. Jones notes the change that had occurred in him as a reaction to the melancholia he suffered there. He eventually broke with Freud after his book Das Trauma der Geburt (1923; The Trauma of Birth, 1929) appeared. Freud opposed what he finally considered to be Rank's error in attributing to birth trauma the determination of anxiety and his underemphasis of the role of incest drives and the Oedipus complex. After the split with Freud he left Vienna, finally settling in the U.S. in 1935. Rank applied psychoanalytic theory to the arts and to mythology in his works Der Kuenstler (1907; Art and Artist, 1932) and Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden (1909; The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, 1914). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: E. Jones, Sigmund Freud, 3 (1957), 45ff. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: J. Taft, Otto Rank (1958); A. Zottl, Otto Rank (1982); E. Menaker, Otto Rank (1982); E.J. Lieberman, Acts of Will (1985); E. Menaker, Separation, Will, and Creativity (1996). (Louis Miller)