25 Facts About Otto Rank

In 1926, Rank left Vienna for Paris and, for the remainder of his life, led a successful career as a lecturer, writer, and therapist in France and the United States.

In 1905, at the age of 21, he so impressed Freud with a study that he invited Otto Rank to become Secretary of the emerging Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

Otto Rank thus became the first paid member of the psychoanalytic movement, and Freud's "right-hand man" for almost 20 years.

Otto Rank was one of Freud's six collaborators brought together in a secret "committee" or "ring" to defend the psychoanalytic mainstream as disputes with Alfred Adler and Carl Jung developed.

Otto Rank was the most prolific author in the "ring" besides Freud himself, extending psychoanalytic theory to the study of legend, myth, art, creativity and The Double.

Otto Rank worked closely with Freud, contributing two chapters on myth and legend to Freud's key monograph The Interpretation of Dreams.

Otto Rank's name appeared underneath Freud's on the title page of Freud's greatest work from 1914 until 1930.

Between 1915 and 1918, Otto Rank served as Secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association which Freud had founded in 1910.

Otto Rank coined the term "pre-Oedipal" in a public psychoanalytic forum in 1925.

Ferenczi's rupture with Otto 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.

In May 1926, having made the feeling relationship in the "here-and-now" central to his practice of psychotherapy, Otto Rank moved to Paris where he became a psychotherapist for artists such as Henry Miller and Anais Nin and lectured at the Sorbonne.

On her second visit to Otto Rank, she reflects on her desire to be "re-born," feelingly, as a woman and artist.

Otto Rank, she observes, helped her move back and forth between what she could verbalize in her journals and what remained unarticulated.

Otto Rank discovered the quality and depth of her feelings in the wordless transitions between what she could say and what she could not say.

In France and later in America, Otto Rank enjoyed great success as a therapist and writer from 1926 to 1939.

Just as Erik Erikson was the first analyst to focus on identity and adulthood, Otto Rank was the first to propose that separation from outworn thoughts, feelings and behaviors is the quintessence of psychological growth and development.

Otto Rank died in New York City in 1939 from a kidney infection, one month after Freud's physician-assisted suicide on the Jewish Day of Atonement.

Taft wrote the first biography of Otto Rank and had a profound understanding of his thinking on how the creative will emerges from the empathic relationship between client and social worker.

In 1936 Carl Rogers, influenced by social workers on his staff trained at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work, invited Otto Rank to give a series of lectures in New York on Rank's post-Freudian models of experiential and relational therapy.

Rogers was transformed by these lectures and always credited Otto Rank with having profoundly shaped "client-centered" therapy and the entire profession of counseling.

Otto Rank affected the practice of action-oriented and reflective therapies such as dramatic role-playing and psychodrama.

Otto Rank was the first to see therapy as a learning and unlearning experience focusing on feelings.

Becker's posthumously published book, Escape from Evil was devoted in large measure to exploring Otto Rank's psychoanalysis rooted in the idea of history as a succession of immortality ideologies.

The American priest and theologian, Matthew Fox, founder of Creation Spirituality and Wisdom University, considers Otto Rank to be one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century.

Otto Rank was a Freudian dissident who, in introducing the concept of immortality ideologies, traced out historical and psychological roots of 'soul-belief'.