Julio Roberto Costa - To Be More Person: a reading of Otto Rank

1 Otto Rank as a Psychoanalyst

Itis true that the name of Otto Rank is not well known. Most of the time, he isonly mentioned in contexts ranging from transpersonal psychology to comparisonsbetween Freud and Nietzsche. In the history of psychoanalysis, he is seen as apsychoanalyst of the circle of Freud who changed direction upon adoption of thehypothesis of the birth trauma, an hypothesis supposedly refuted subsequently.

AmongFreud's disciples, Rank was unique in that his origins were not in the field ofmedicine. He had more ties to the fields of philosophy and literature, andadmired the writings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Ibsen, etc. This admirationwas extended to the personalities of these and other great men of the historyof mankind, concomitantly with a special fascination with the figure of theartist. Rank was already an avid reader of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer when heencountered Freud and psychoanalysis. He soon became an admirer of Freud'stheory, believing that in it he had found the great response to all questionsinvolving the human being. Strong ties were created between him and Freud, withexpectations met by both in all aspects. Thus Freud wrote:

One day a young manwho had studied at a technical school introduced himself to me with amanuscript manifesting rare comprehension.... In him, our small society gaineda conscientious and trustworthy secretary, and I had in Otto Rank a faithfulhelper and collaborator. (Alexander et al, 1981)

Rankbegan to participate in several different activities. With Hanns Sachs, hefounded the journal Imago; published, together with Sandor Ferenczi andErnest Jones, the Internationale Zeitschrift fr Psychoanalyse, andcollaborated with Sachs and Ferenczi in various studies. He was not in any waya secondary figure in the midst of Jung, Adler and all the others.

Hestarted working on an hypothesis derived from his own clinical experience,which was the birth trauma. At the core of this hypothesis was separationanxiety, archetypically experienced in the birth of the child; and the reactionto this primal angst, as Rank called it, would orient the future developmentof the individual, in which he or she would either resolve it in different waysor be subject to neurosis. As psychiatrist Carlos Jos Hernandez tells us,

In the sacredunconscious there is an engram at the level of proto-phantasies that hasrecorded the founding, i.e. primordial occurrence, with all its anxiety. Thisrecord recounts the loss of an ideal situation, where we were protected inones mother's womb, in an environment of plenitude.... In abandonment of theuterine world is shaped all abandonment; it is the passage from a situation ofprotection to a defenseless situation, in which it is necessary to relearn anew adaptation... a man's whole life is an attempt to reduce the impact of theanxiety provoked by every type of separation. There was a lost paradise wherethere was no anxiety and we will move on to a future paradise where there willbe no anxiety. (Hernandez, 1986, p. 44-45)

WhenFreud saw the book, he initially considered the work as an importantcontribution to psychoanalysis. However, some time later, he perceived that ifbirth trauma were correct, the importance of the Oedipus complex would bediminished. They were, therefore, mutually exclusive. When Freud urged Rank torecant, he did not do so, giving rise to an embarrassing situation, painful forboth Freud and Rank.

Thesituation having become unbearable, Rank abandoned Freud's circle to develophis own school of thought. In the process, he arrived at a constructive psychologyof the will, as he designated it. At that point, he had already moved far awayfrom the psychoanalytic paradigms.

1.1 - Constructive Psychology of the Will

Bythe very non-reductionist nature of his thinking, it is somehow too daunting atask to try to summarize Rank in a few words. As for constructive psychologyof the will, it should be borne in mind that such a definition might easily bemisinterpreted. For example:

a) Constructivemeans both not determined by infra-personal factors, and genetic, referringto the genesis of the individual as a human being.

b) Of the willemphasizes an element which, although grounded in drive, is enriched by thephenomenon of the human person, who will orient and give purpose to it withina cultural context which is the locus of the person.

This constructive psychologyof the will was to lay the groundwork for a philosophy of the psychic, whichwould be more comprehensive, dealing, as it does, not only with psychologicalaspects related to the clinic, but also with the epistemological aspects.