Otto Rank

Otto Rank was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer and philosopher, born Otto Rosenfeld in Vienna in 1884 and died in 1939. He became one of Sigmund Freud's closest collaborators, served as secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and edited leading psychoanalytic journals. He earned a doctorate in literature at the University of Vienna in 1912. His book The Trauma of Birth, published in 1924, proposed that the anxiety of separation at birth precedes the Oedipus complex, introduced the term pre-Oedipal and led to his break with Freud. He later practised psychotherapy in Paris and New York, promoting a relationship-based approach that influenced existential, interpersonal and humanistic therapy and social work.