Otto Rank...

Otto Rank was born Otto Rosenfeld on April 22, 1884, the second son to a family that could only afford the best education for the eldest son. Rank studied engineering. Through his family doctor, Alfred Adler, Rank met Sigmund Freud, who shared Adler's high estimation of the then 20-year-old Rank. Rank would play a significant role in the evolution of the ideas surrounding Freud - a footnote early in the Postscript to Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego reads "What follows at this point was written under the influence of an exchange of ideas with Otto Rank." (That particular book, according to the back-cover copy, addresses the question "What are the emotional bonds that hold colllective entities, such as an army or a church, together?" In other words, the crucial concept of transference - or why we'll "not see nothing like the mighty Quinn.")

Rank served a critical role in the psychoanalytical movement through tension, tumult, dissension and schism- the worst rival to Rank was Ernest Jones, who envied Rank's talent and access to Freud. Jones could still, however, manage words of praise for Rank such as these: "[He] would assuredly have been very successful had he entered the world of finance."

The break with Freud and the more dogmatic Freudians came in 1926, and Rank moved to Paris. On February 6, 1934, France almost suffered a right-wing coup - if Rank thought he had gotten far enough away form the anti-intellectual forces then in european politics, he had to think again. The next year, he was in New York, where he continued a well-established and very successful career as an analyst, lecturer and author. His biographer, E. James Lieberman, reports that Rank was quite "taken" with tours of Harlem nightlife in the company of Anais Nin. It might not be too much to imagine him crossing paths with John Hammond.

Rank could easily be imagined anticipating his increased influence once the elderly Freud left the stage. But on October 31, 1939 only 38 days after Freud's death, Rank died of an allergic reaction to medication.

Reviewing a book by Louis Breger entitled Freud for the December 17, 2000 issue of the New York Times Book Review, Mark Edmundson wrote: "Exiled analysts like Rank... may still have a ot to teach practicing analysts, and the rest of us as well. By keeping their lives and contributions before us, Breger suggests some future directions for the development of psychoanalysis. And that is an important contribution."
 

To inoculate the world with disillusionment is to restructure the world toward freedom.

 

"The greatest blessing of our democracy is freedom.  But in the last analysis, our only freedom is the freedom to discipline ourselves."  -- Bernard Baruch

 

"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." --Reinhold Niebuhr