Otto Rank

Austrian psychoanalyst (1884–1939), born Otto Rosenfeld, who came to Freud's Wednesday circle in 1906 as a young man trained in a machine shop and reading on his own, and served for two decades as its secretary, its most erudite member and the editor of its journals. His early books applied analysis to myth and literature rather than to patients: The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909) found one recurring plot behind Sargon, Moses, Oedipus and Christ, and Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage (1912) traced a single motif through Western literature.

Freud gave him a ring as one of the six members of the secret Committee, and for years he was spoken of as an heir. The break came with The Trauma of Birth (1924), which proposed that separation from the mother, not the Oedipal conflict with the father, is the prototype of all later anxiety, and that analysis should therefore be short, focused on the present tie between patient and analyst, and ended by a deliberate act rather than allowed to run for years.

The circle read this as a defection; within three years he had left Vienna for Paris and then New York. His later work moved away from psychoanalysis altogether: Art and Artist (1932) took the creative will, not the neurosis, as the centre of the personality, and described the artist as someone who solves in work the same problem of separation and individuation that everyone faces.

Through Carl Rogers, who called reading Rank decisive, and Rollo May, that line entered humanistic and existential therapy; Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death is built largely on him. He died in New York a month after Freud.