In the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
In 1905, at the age of 21, Otto Rank presented Freud with a short manuscript on the artist, a study that so impressed Freud he invited Rank to become Secretary of the emerging Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Rank thus became the first paid member of the psychoanalytic movement, and Freud's "right-hand man" for almost 20 years. Freud considered Rank, with whom he was more intimate intellectually than his own sons, to be the most brilliant of his Viennese disciples.
Rank was one of Freud's six collaborators brought together in a secret "committee" or "ring" to defend the psychoanalytic mainstream as disputes with Adler and then Jung developed. Rank was the most prolific author in the "ring" besides Freud himself, extending psychoanalytic theory to the study of legend, myth, art, and other works of creativity. He worked closely with Freud, contributing two chapters on myth and legend to later editions of The Interpretation of Dreams. Rank's name appeared underneath Freud's on the title page of Freud's greatest work for many years. Between 1915 and 1918, Rank served as Secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association which Freud had founded in 1910. Everyone in the small psychoanalytic world understood how much Freud respected Rank and his prolific creativity in expanding psychoanalytic theory.
(NOTE HOW THE JEWS CONSPIRED TO COVER EACH OTHER'S CRAPPY LIES... to protect their "Rank" -- The CSR )
Post-Vienna life and work
In May 1926, having made emotional relationship in the "here-and-now" central to his practice of psychotherapy, Rank moved to Paris where he became a psychotherapist for artists such as Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin and lectured at the Sorbonne (Lieberman, 1985).
According to Rank, all emotional life is grounded in the present. In Will Therapy, published in German in 1929-31, Rank uses the term "here and now" for the first time in the psychotherapeutic literature: "Freud made the repression historical, that is, misplaced it into the childhood of the individual and then wanted to release it from there, while as a matter of fact the same tendency is working here and now" (Rank, 1929-31, p. 39). Instead of the word Verdrängung (repression), which laid stress on unconscious repression of the past, Rank preferred to use the word Verleugnung (denial), which focused instead on the emotional will to remain ill in the present: "The neurotic lives too much in the past [and] to that extent he actually does not live. He suffers ... because he clings to [the past], wants to cling to it, in order to protect himself from experience [Erlebnis], the emotional surrender to the present" (Rank, 1929-31, p. 27).
In France and later in America, Rank enjoyed great success as a therapist and writer from 1926 to 1939. Traveling frequently between France and America, Rank lectured at universities such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and University of Pennsylvania on relational, experiential and "here-and-now" psychotherapy, art, the creative will, and "neurosis as a failure in creativity" (Rank, 1996).
Just as Erik Erikson was the first analyst to focus on identity and adulthood, Rank was the first to propose that separation from outworn thoughts, emotions and behaviors is the quintessence of psychological growth and development. In the late 1920s, after he left Freud's inner circle, Rank explored how human beings can learn to assert their will within relationship, and advocated a maximum degree of individuation within a maximum degree of connectedness.
Foreshadowing the central themes of Piaget, Kohlberg, McClelland, Erikson and Kegan, Rank was the first to propose that human development is a lifelong construction, which requires continual negotiation and renegotiation of the dual yearnings for individuation and connection, the will to separate and the will to unite. Decades before Ronald Fairbairn, now credited by many as the inventor in the 1940s of modern object-relations theory, Rank's 1926 lecture on "The Genesis of the Object Relation" marks the first complete statement of this theory (Rank, 1996, pp. 140-149). By 1926 Rank was persona non grata in the official psychoanalytic world. There is little reason to believe, therefore, that any of the other writers credited with helping to invent object relations theory (Melanie Klein or Donald Winnicott, for example) ever read the German text of this lecture, published as Zur Genese der Object-beziehung in Vol. 1 of Rank's Genetische Psychologie (1927, pp. 110-22).
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. "Komisch" (strange, odd, comical), Rank said on his deathbed (Lieberman, 1985, p. 389).
[edit] Influence
Rollo May, a pioneer of existential psychotherapy in the United States, was deeply influenced by Rank's post-Freudian lectures and writings and always considered Rank to be the most important precursor of existential therapy. Shortly before his death, Rollo May wrote the foreword to Robert Kramer's edited collection of Rank's American lectures. "I have long considered Otto Rank to be the great unacknowledged genius in Freud's circle," said May (Rank, 1996, p. xi).
In 1936 Carl Rogers, the most influential psychologist in America after William James, 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 Rank with having profoundly shaped "client-centered" therapy and the entire profession of counselling. "I became infected with Rankian ideas," said Rogers (Kramer, 1995).(http://www.ottorank.com/wp-content/uplo ... rogers.pdf (http://www.ottorank.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/rogers.pdf)).
The New York writer Paul Goodman, who was co-founder with Fritz Perls of the Gestalt method of psychotherapy, one of the most popular in the world today, and one that makes Otto Rank's "here-and-now" central to its approach, described Rank's post-Freudian ideas on art and creativity as "beyond praise" in Gestalt Therapy (Perls, Goodman and Hefferline, 1951, p. 395). According to Ervin Polster (1968), a pre-eminent Gestalt therapist, "Rank brought the human relationship directly into his office. He influenced analysts to take seriously the actual present interaction between therapist and patient, rather than maintain the fixed, distant, 'as though' relationship that had given previous analysts an emotional buffer for examining the intensities of therapeutic sensation and wish. Rank's contributions opened the way for encounter to become accepted as a deep therapeutic agent" (p. 6).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Rank (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Rank)