Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: debates and confrontations about anxiety and birth

Abstract

The publication of Otto Rank’s The Trauma of Birth (1924) gave rise to an intense debate within the secret Committee and confronted Freud with one of his most beloved disciples. After analyzing the letters that the Professor exchanged with his closest collaborators and reviewing the works he published during this period, it is clear that anxiety was a crucial element among the topics in dispute. His reflections linked to the signal anxiety concept allowed Freud to refute Rank’s thesis that defined birth trauma as the paradigmatic key to understanding neurosis, and, in turn, was a way of confirming the validity of the concepts of Oedipus complex, repression and castration in the conceptualization of anxiety. The reasons for the modifications of anxiety theory in the mid‐1920s cannot be reduced, as Freud would affirm officially in his work of 1926, to the detection of internal contradictions in his theory or to the desire to establish a metapsychological version of the problem, for they gain their essential impulse from the debate with Rank.

Key words:

• anxiety
• Freud
• Rank
• signal anxiety
• trauma of birth

Notes

1. According to Peter Gay (1988), Freud had a paternal interest in Rank when he joined the Wednesday Psychological Society. He called him affectionately ‘little Rank’, “betraying just a touch of condescension” (p. 176). The “little society,” said Freud (1914), “acquired in him a zealous and dependable secretary, and I gained in Otto Rank a most loyal helper and co‐worker” (p. 25).

2. Until the conflict with Rank, Freud supposed that anxiety was an effect of the repressive process. In a note added to Three Essays on Sexual Theory, he stated: “One of the most important results of psycho‐analytic research is this discovery that neurotic anxiety arises out of libido, that it is the product of a transformation of it, and that it is thus related to it in the same kind of way as vinegar is to wine” (Freud, 1905, p. 224).

3. The German version uses the word angst: “Daβ das Kind Angst habe” (Freud, 1917c, p. 412).

4. When towards the end of his life Freud (1939) accepted the challenge of reconstructing the story of Moses, he returned despite everything to the hypothesis of the birth of the hero, and pointed out that while he was under his influence “Rank’s researches have made us acquainted with the source and purpose of this myth” (p. 12).

5. An example is a troubling incident that took place in a meeting of the Committee in San Cristoforo, Italy, in the middle of 1923. In the midst of an intense discussion Jones is said to have called Rank a ‘thieving Jew’ (Freud & Jones, 1998). The unreserved condemnation of all those present and the request made by its members that Jones be expelled from the Committee necessitated the intervention of Freud as a mediator (Lieberman, 1985; Gay, 1988).

6. The text entitled The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex (Freud, 1924) would be published eventually. However, in the final paragraph, Freud warned: “since the publication of Otto Rank’s interesting study, The Trauma of Birth, even the conclusion arrived at by this modest investigation, to the effect that the boy’s Oedipus complex is destroyed by the fear of castration, cannot be accepted without further discussion. Nevertheless, it seems to me premature to enter into such a discussion at the present time and perhaps inadvisable to begin a criticism or an appreciation of Rank’s view at this juncture” (p. 179).

7. In contrast with the intensity of the conflict in his An Autobiographical Study (Freud, 1925) – written, according to Jones (1957) around August and September 1924 − Freud’s only observations were that “mythology became the special province of Otto Rank; the interpretation of myths, the tracing of them back to the familiar unconscious complexes of early childhood, the replacing of astral explanations by a discovery of human motives, all of this is to a large extent due to his analytic efforts” (p. 69).

8. In the middle of the crisis with Rank, Freud (1924) told his disciples that he considered himself to be “particularly inept at exercising the functions of a despotic and ever vigilant censor” (Freud & Abraham, 1969, p. 351). Even so, he would issue a very direct warning: “it’s not easy for me to enter into others’ way of thinking; I must generally wait until our points of view have converged, following the meanderings of my own way. So, if you want to await my approval every time you have a new idea, you risk growing very old in the meantime” (Freud & Abraham, 1969, p. 351).

9. The debate maintained between Freud and Rank about the intrauterine life, the birth and their potential traumatic effects were revisited by Greenacre (1941a, 1941b). Without sharing the paradigmatic value attributed by Rank to the birth trauma, or adhering fully to the Freudian criticism, both references will be used to investigate the predisposition to anxiety and the increase of narcissism that register the serious neurosis (Greenacre 1941a). After analyzing the arguments and adding new clinical evidence, Greenacre (1941b) sustained that “severe suffering and frustration occurring in the antenatal and early postnatal months, especially in the period preceding speech development, leave a heightened organic stamp on the make‐up of the child” (p. 610).

10. When Freud (1917b) still considered anxiety to be an effect of repression, he distinguished between realistic anxiety and neurotic anxiety. The first, he held, “strikes us as something very rational and intelligible. We may say of it that it is a reaction to the perception of an external danger − that is, of an injury which is expected and foreseen” (Freud, 1917b, p. 393–4). As for the second, “the ego is making a similar attempt at flight from the demand by its libido, that it is treating this internal danger as though it were an external one” (p. 405).

11. Freud’s thesis about the early moments of psychic structuration and his way of conceptualizing the relations between anxiety and danger were discussed in detail by Melanie Klein. She criticized the function of the castration complex and the father’s role promoted by Freud (Klein, 1929), and affirmed that the principal cause in the determination of anxiety was the death instinct (Klein, 1948).

12. Requiescat in pace: may you rest in peace.