Pulling Rank
The Sins of Freud’s Exiled Poet-Son
Jamieson Webster
The story of Otto Rank is an intimate tale, the saddest story of all the disciples of Freud who were deemed heretics for trespassing on a question of breath, birth, and the unconscious. As the Second World War approached, the story with Rank grew tragic—not because of war, but the way it led to tensions in this group of newly formed explorers of the unconscious. Freud lost his daughter to the Spanish flu after World War I, and then her son, Heinele, his grandson being one of the last remnants of her that he cherished. Freud was also beginning to slowly die of cancer. Rank was the sacrificial lamb in the conflicts between Freud and his inner circle.
Rank’s story is a common story of familial violence between father, favored son, and siblings, one Freud himself retold in his story of the primal father in Totem and Taboo, before it took place in front of him. Reading the letters between Freud and Rank shook me; at a certain moment Freud is merciless. At others, he appears cruel, vulgar, careless. At the center of their disagreements stood the question of anxiety, breath, and birth, a proxy for the fight over the origin of the unconscious. Why such a struggle to name and claim this Archimedean point? Freud didn’t want to, but the sons certainly did. And one by one, they were forced out of the kingdom.
Carl Jung’s flag was the collective unconscious, the world of archetypal images connected to an ancestral and sacred past. Adler placed his guarantee on the side of the social—all feeling of lack flows from there and can be amended. Wilhelm Reich named his kingdom Orgonon and sought to manipulate, collect, undo the obstacles to this original energetic force. His enemy was the emotional plague otherwise known as fascism. Otto Rank put his stakes on the trauma of birth, the scathing anxiety that follows the separation from the mother’s body who then becomes a point of hatred and nostalgic longing.
Maybe Rank came the closest to Freud’s own thought, saying that this point of origin is the body of the mother—not the divine mother, or mother energy, or the collective good mother of society. If we say that the fight is a fight over the body of the mother, then Freud really would be right. It was an Oedipal battle by the sons against the father’s claim on her. They fought this battle by trying to erase Oedipus or rush back behind it to some more original existence. Being able to stay within the Oedipal framework became the litmus test for Freud of who could remain a true psychoanalyst: who wouldn’t run from its impossible insights towards a nicer depiction of what is in the human heart.
When Freud first began to gather his flock, Otto Rank was the youngest to join up. In 1905, at the age of twenty-one, he wrote an interpretation of Freud’s dream of Frau Doni, a brazen attempt to take on Freud’s dream and show the whole dream book as an elaborate “court of appeals.” The dream revealed the structure of the book in its entirety: an attempt to reveal and hide Freud’s neurosis while making the counter claim that he was normal and everyone has dreams. Freud was making his mark as a scientist and genius for the sake of truth and scientific progress, but also was trying to assuage his doubts about himself, thumb his nose at his father, and manage a life-long fear of poverty. Ultimately, claims Rank, the project was designed to protect his children from what he suffered, express his satisfaction with them, especially his eldest son’s desire to be a poet, while the book also continually speaks of a desire to get rid of them, wanting his time and money and fame to himself so that he could study the unconscious.
Freud’s ambivalence about his children is at the heart of the Frau Doni dream. She is a woman who died in childbirth with the midwife who had helped Freud’s wife give birth to Freud’s two youngest daughters. Twenty-one-year-old Rank zeroes in on this. The dream and its associations show Freud regretting having his children, reproaching his wife for coming from narrow circumstances, and trying to shift blame onto her for their predicament with too many children and not enough money. Perhaps it would be better not to have married—or to at least have married well. If not that, better that they, or she, died in childbirth. This macabre thought is the dream wish that is fulfilled, declares Rank. Freud wants to clear out all obstacles to his discoveries and fame. Freud reports awakening with a feeling of satisfaction for having children, but only, Rank claims, after having a dream that fulfilled its opposite wish.
Can you imagine writing this to Freud, whom you don’t know, at the age of twenty-one? Rank is stunning in his narration of the rhetorical moves of Freud’s dream, the argument–counter-argument court room battle that follows so closely Freud’s notion of the kettle logic of wishes—the kettle I borrowed isn’t broken, it was broken when you gave it to me, I never borrowed your kettle:
In the course of the dream it is quite clear that there occurs a dampening of the initially postulated ruthless, ego-centered wishes. You make more and more concessions. I shouldn’t have married; but if I married, I should have had no children; but if I had many children, it should have been with an indistinct person; but if I had to have them with my wife, they should have all been “spared”; but if they could not all be spared, at least the boys should have been; and if not all the boys, then at least the eldest . . . The result of these dampenings—the manner of your reproach toward your wife in lieu of highly forceful accusations—was not solid enough for this compromise-forming court of appeals (which found itself dealing with an experienced dream interpreter, and used all its wits, as it were, to deceive you): it finally converted the affect (satisfaction) into its opposite.
What we now know more intimately of Freud’s biography follows Rank’s interpretation. This is the opening communication of the disciple who would come closest to a son. It is an appeal to a Father in the form of a challenge. See that I am worthy. See that I see you.
Rank was like a son to Freud. Not only in age, but in intimacy. Anna Freud (the only one of Freud’s children to become a psychoanalyst), 12 years Rank’s junior, worked continuously with Rank once she was twenty-three. He was also one of the few younger followers to live in Vienna. The figure of Frau Doni feels drawn from a crystal ball, replete with smoke and shaking and heavy breathing. Rank signs his letter of March 12, 1905, “I could also explain to you why I had to be the one to ‘discover’ all of this, but—! Anyway, perhaps you’ll guess the reason yourself.” One assumes the reason has to do with Rank’s fear of poverty and trouble with his biological father.
Eventually, Rank would be cast out for putting the mother, her difficult task of giving birth, and the child’s difficult task of being born, and the resulting fear of the mother’s influence, at the center of the psychoanalytic story. Not the father. In the beginning, he did not see this as a take-down of Freud; but Freud certainly did. To be clear, Freud could have had this opinion already at the time of Rank’s interpretation of his dream. He welcomed the challenge in 1905. In fact, Rank impressed Freud so greatly, Freud invited him to become secretary of the newly formed Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Eventually, Freud asked Rank to co-author certain sections in a subsequent edition of The Interpretation of Dreams.
Rank worked tirelessly for small sums of money from Freud and his independently wealthy first followers. As Freud acknowledged, they would be nowhere without the efforts of Rank who acted as secretary and editor, coordinating the psychoanalytic movement in its infancy. Rank was a locksmith by education in trade school. Freud encouraged Rank to attend the University of Vienna, where he finished his college degree and doctorate.
Rank’s thesis was on psychoanalysis and Wagner. Freud applauded Rank’s efforts to integrate psychoanalysis with the study of literature, ancient philosophy, the history of religion. He never recommended that Rank be analyzed despite intense struggles with depression, not even once he began seeing patients himself. Rank was the first lay analyst, a psychoanalyst that was not a medical physician. He was Freud’s untouched poet-son.
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What Freud and his followers did to Rank is a rank story about keeping rank. Forgive me the pun on Rank’s name, but it is hardly avoidable, especially since it was a self-chosen moniker. Erasing the name Rosenfeld of his alcoholic father, he dubbed himself Otto Rank after Dr. Rank from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House who is one-part psychoanalyst, one-part couples’ therapist, and a bit of a third wheel in a ménage à trois. He is also dying of a chronic illness. Fact: Rank died in New York City, New York, on 31 October 1939 from a reaction to a drug he was given for a kidney infection. “Komisch” was said to be the final, ironic utterance on his deathbed—meaning funny, odd, uncanny.
Komisch as well, The Trauma of Birth causes a violent separation between Rank and the Vienna circle. Again, Freud welcomed Rank’s work as an “interesting addition” at first, even as he stated that he didn’t agree with all of it. The book would be a source of lively debate and inquiry; “no coup or revolution in conflict with our secure findings presents itself.” But the opposition of his peers began to mount, Rank became testy, and little by little Freud began to intonate that Rank abandoned the ground of psychoanalysis. “I’ve receded further from agreeing with your innovations,” writes Freud to Rank. “I’m often concerned about you.” The elimination of the father from his theory seemed “much too much” to come from “the influence of personal factors” in Rank’s life, “factors I believe I am familiar with.” He requests that Rank “not become fixated” and find his way back.
Rank does become increasingly fixated in response to this circling of the wagons. Freud plays no small part in riling up the troops. He ruthlessly pesters Ferenczi to give up his allegiance to Rank and his estimation of the value of the birth trauma theory. He practically plays them off one another. Freud wrote to Ferenczi in 1924,
The truth is that I liked the thing much better in the beginning than I do now and that, according to your own quotation, I am on the way from the 66% to the 33% [Ferenczi had quoted Freud saying, “I don’t know if 33% or 66% is true, in any case, this is the most significant advance since the discovery of psychoanalysis.”] [. . .] If the trauma of birth works not onto- but phylogenetically, only then does he have a connection to your theory of genitality, which otherwise eludes him [. . .] I must return to the thoroughly inept and deficient presentation in Rank’s case [. . .] While I hold fast in the theoretical estimation of the at least 33%, from a practical perspective, all valuation fails me.
Ferenczi tried vouching for Rank’s theory, speaking of its value to his own work on the wish to return to the womb as a recapitulation of the return to the sea. The ancient geological catastrophes are repeated in the trauma of birth. The fantasied return to the womb, closest when we are dreaming, sleeping, or fucking, is filled with scathing anxiety. Their theories, Ferenczi claimed, were entirely sympathetic. The anxieties tied to birth and Mother Earth ran like an underground current in the libidinal development of sexuality, influencing the way the Oedipus complex runs aground. Possessiveness of the mother is thoroughly ambivalent. This addition to the interpretation of Oedipus is crucial to their collaborative work on psychoanalytic technique that posited a more active and experiential process in dealing with resistances.
Freud wrote to Ferenczi that they had a distorted view of his clinical work, exaggerated one element— birth—into a one-liner, and were acting like “traveling salesmen.” He was later further angered by a report that Rank’s talks in New York made analysts think they could dispense with sexuality and lengthy analysis. Freud rued that one apparently claimed “one need only interrupt the patient and direct him toward the birth trauma.” The organic unfolding of analysis following the patient’s resistances, layers of repression, and transference manifestations that unlocked the traumatic past was now to be undone by simply telling the patient to re-experience their birth? ‘This is what you’ve wrought?’ Freud practically screams. Rank, of course, felt Freud was being reductive about his work—he hadn’t even read the whole book.
“I was mostly feeling terribly sorry for him,” Freud writes. “The pride of the naughty child always kept the upper hand.” Ferenczi eventually joins the chorus and turns his back on Rank. “He was my best friend and he refused to speak to me,” Rank said of Ferenczi. Why couldn’t these analysts tolerate these minor differences and continue debating and working with one another? Isn’t there room for a varied picture? Karl Abraham and Ernest Jones in London congratulated Freud and Ferenczi on separating themselves more and more from Rank. “I’m sorry I was right as you are yourself,” writes Jones.
Rank attempted one last time to prostrate himself to the whole lot, apologizing in a long, tender, though somewhat defensive letter. He explained that he went too far in his work as a reaction to Freud’s cancer, stirring up his own Oedipus complex and brother complex. Throwing them the bone they were demanding, Rank says his neurotic state was able to invade his sense of objectivity—because he was never analyzed. “I’d ask each among you to understand my emotional remarks against him [Freud] as resulting from this state—and to excuse them as reactions not to be interpreted personally.” While Freud and others on the surface accepted his apology, the damage was done. Rank was declared to be an unanalyzed manic-depressive, was briefly welcomed back into the fold, and readied himself to return to New York. In 1926, he extracted himself again and moved to Paris.
Rank was famously the analyst of Anaïs Nin once in Paris. She said of him: “Dr. Rank was made to feel so alienated from the group that he finally went to practice in Paris . . . He lost not only a father but a master, a world, a universe.” The icing on the cake: at the 1930 International Congress on Mental Hygiene hosted in Washington, A. A. Brill, president of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and the American Psychoanalytic Association, declared him mentally ill and ousted him from the latter. Freud accused him of moving to America because the “dollar lured him.”
I find this last indictment regarding money the most offensive. Rank was poor. The poorest among the analysts. Rank’s “manic-depressive” episodes seem to follow moments of displacement and looming impoverishment while living through the First World War and during the coming winds of the Second. Moments of separation, fearing for his future, seemed to drive him into a depression. When he achieves financial independence, a small amount of recognition, everyone pounces on him. I don’t think, as Freud intimated, that the money made him manic, but rather the confluence of recognition by some and disapproval by others—the most important others, mind you—left him needing to defend himself against feelings of hopelessness and betrayal.
The Trauma of Birth is lovingly dedicated to Freud; a gift to him. Are the psychoanalysts angry that he profits from what is supposed to be a sacrifice laid on the altar of the father? Are they angry he used this book to give birth to himself in line with his theory of the recapitulation of the birth trauma in psychoanalysis? Or is the book too prophetic? The Trauma of Birth, published in 1924, and the work with Ferenczi on technique published in 1923, presage many changes to come.
Freud writes that Rank, as many others, have often disagreed with him—“do you really believe that for that reason I’d have failed to invite you to dinner or that I’d have excluded you from intimacy on my part?” All libido goes back to an original narcissism and still further than that, says Freud, pointing to primal repression. Tracing it back has never had a curative effect as far as he could see! Rank, he says, is looking through a glass darkly:
By the way, can you always determine whether the libido has proceeded from the mother to another object, or whether the mother simply happened to be the first object . . . while the other components of the narcissistic libido turned to other objects? Those are all such dark and indeterminate things that a great deal of tolerance should be permitted in the interpretation.
You can almost hear Freud sneering. Psychoanalysis works on the repressed, but if that work amounts to an abreaction of the birth trauma remains obscure. “Your book has invoked it, but has done nothing to dispel it.” If Rank is going to elevate the trauma of birth and the fixation on the mother to the level he does, what is the benefit? While Freud seems to ask the question rhetorically, I wanted to ask, especially when it came to a question of breathing.
Freud places the primal father as an origin point, the one at the dawn of patriarchal civilization as we know it. This unites us to that history going beyond any individual situation as such. The birth trauma reduces you to an accident of individual history, leaving aside the endlessly conflictual and traumatic unfolding of human history. Does Rank believe that abreacting birth trauma will solve all this? Freud thinks not.
Freud points out a profound contradiction in Rank regarding his treatment of anxiety. Freud would rework his theory of anxiety in his book Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety published two years after Rank’s Trauma of Birth, which was clearly useful for Freud even as he let it destroy their friendship. In a letter to Rank, Freud claims he is ultimately wary of the regressive path that he sees Rank opening:
On the one hand, you claim that this anxiety is a beneficial construction as it forbids the desired regression. On the other hand, you claim that a desirable achievement of analysis is to eliminate this anxiety through abreaction of the birth trauma, thereby actually opening up the path to regression for the first time. Something is wrong here.
Something is wrong here. We have been getting closer and closer to this “wrong” as we trace the question of breath. Should we be on a path of such regression?
Freud goes on to call Rank nasty, bitter, and angry. He says in a letter to Brill that Rank ought not to be so pleased with himself for remaining unanalyzed given that he knows intimately the danger that has already undone some people (presumably Jung, Adler), taking what stirs in them and projecting it in the form of a theory onto science—overcoming none of it in themselves. “This exegesis is very painful for me,” Freud implores Rank. “I can’t give up hope that you’ll come further toward calm self-reflection.” As if to throw his hands up at Rank one more time, in the book on anxiety (the “answer” to Rank), Freud says the psychoanalyst must quit the unproductive search for the mysteries of the psycho-physical without delay. He also makes clear that repression is a saving grace and not something to be undone wholesale.
“One could argue that Rank wasn’t looking to undo repression. In fact, Rank is not only an early feminist revision of Freud, but also an elevation of the struggle around the primary object of attachment—the mother.”
One could argue that Rank wasn’t looking to undo repression. In fact, Rank is not only an early feminist revision of Freud, but also an elevation of the struggle around the primary object of attachment—the mother. The examples he uses of children’s typical fears of animals, the dark, separation, along with anarchic enjoyment in repetition and unending wishes for closeness, are credited to Freud, even as he describes these in the relation to the image of inter-uterine bliss and the trauma of birth. Rank also writes that our lack of understanding about women in psychoanalysis (which tends to take the male point of view), and the social underestimation of women more generally, is an expression of “the primal repression that tries to degrade and to deny woman both socially and intellectually on account of her original connection with the birth trauma.” Rank says that taking on this primal repression should “reinstate the high estimation of women” and free her from “the curse on her genitals.”
He wanted the birth trauma theory to account for why both sexes “disregard the female genitals,” bringing about a universal debasement of women. Even further, if men come closest to penetrating back into the womb through intercourse, and both are fixated on the mother, then women don’t envy the penis, they envy this proximity that men fantastically think they achieve during intercourse. It isn’t merely the penis-in-vagina (semen entering the womb) literalness—I mean, it is—but what I read here is that the man’s will to possess the mother through the other woman is a source of anxiety that can stir up competitive feelings or a heightened sense of her own renunciation of the mother.
The penetrated girl is left nowhere, forced to identify with herself in the future as future mother like her own mother. The grief of an inability to attain anything like inter-uterine bliss through sexual relationships appears in the form of a demand for ever-greater forms of satisfaction bringing yet more grief. The attempt at transferring this complex of wishes onto the estimation of the male genital, the separating powers of the father as world, is important, but “still born.” Indeed it is.
In the end, Rank saw the trauma as the psycho-physical ground that psychoanalysis had always been searching for—the mystery of the psychosomatic, the origin of the chaos of the drives, the surplus of bodily energy:
What needs to be explained is, not the ‘conversion’ of psychical excitations into physical, but how means of expression which were purely physical in origin could come to demand psychical expression. But this demand appears to be the mechanism by which the anxiety arises, which is, so to say, the first psychical content of which the human being is conscious.
Rank is bold. It is not the somatic expression of the psychic that should interest us, but this moment when the somatic seeks expression, requires something psychic. All sublimations (seen in elaborate readings of artistic, literary, religious works for Rank) express the birth trauma, emphasizing a separation from the mother and a renewal of one’s identity as a way of trying to put birth trauma to bed—a mastery of it a second time. We live between two births.
Rank saw mental illness as a withdrawal from the world back into a state as close to inter-uterine life as possible, at its most extreme in certain catatonic or twilight states of psychosis. “Neurotic disturbances in breathing,” he writes, repeat the moment of suffocation during birth, neurotic headaches repeat the crushing of the head, and “the great hysterical attack,” putting her body into an “arc de cercle position,” is “diametrically opposed to the doubled-up embryonal position” into which she often returns. All of this is as if to cry “Away from the (mother’s) genitals!” writes Rank.
Since the physical trauma comes first the symptom can be influenced from both directions. “When recently there was some talk of attacks of asthma—even such as were of a psychic nature—having been influenced favorably by operating on the larynx, similar recent experiences of the removal of nervous phenomena in children (such as anxiety states and dreams, etc.), by freeing the nasal passages, admitted of just as little doubt.” But the reverse also holds, meaning something physical can happen, like an operation, and the birth complex is stirred up creating sudden anxiety.
I remember a kind of fury and then melancholia that followed two patients’ experiences with anesthesia—it was the perfect breathless sleep—the only relief they said they had ever experienced from anxiety. I thought of the way Michael Jackson died, having his personal physician administer propofol and anti-anxiety medications nightly, which eventually killed him. It kills because breathing and blood pressure slows too much, slows to the point of stopping breathing. I also thought about our newfound addiction to powerful sedatives from ketamine to fentanyl and tranq. Wouldn’t the regressive path towards anxiety free be the same path as Jackson, for example, who seems to be searching for blank sleep, bliss, a regressive return to the womb, and a scotomizing of trauma, no less history?
While it is true that eventually Rank admits that some of his ideas regarding birth trauma were an exaggeration, a stretch—that his readings of literature were a bit reductive—there are important insights in his work. But as so many of Freud’s excommunicated, he had to define himself against Freud. Rank eventually becoming something of an existentialist (influencing the origin of existential, humanist and gestalt psychology in the United States), making psychoanalysis about the will to be born or exist.
Seeking to locate the psycho-physical origin of the unconscious—the knot of primal repression—takes many psychoanalysts close to breath: Breuer, Fliess, Jung, Rank, Ferenczi, and especially Reich. It puts these intrepid investigators almost instantly into exile with their maker. Freud never addresses breath except as a sidenote in relation to anxiety and the upward displacement from the genitals to the mouth, but how can we not hear the fundamental rule—say anything, say everything you can say—as an incitement towards the breathing that is speaking? And perhaps we ought to include smoking as a breathing symptom, the scene of Freud’s undoing, and psychoanalysis born amidst a Victorian tobacco trance. Breathing really would be the decentered center of this dream of the psychoanalytic primal horde. We seem to have a choice—go there, or go with Freud.