Otto Rank

His theories about mythology and religion examined by Stefan Stenudd

One member of Freud's Secret Committee of his most loyal supporters was Otto Rank (1884-1939) — from its formation in 1912 until 1924, when Rank went his own way. Rank was born in Vienna, Freud's hometown, and joined with him already at the age of 21, in 1906. He remained a very close and appreciated collaborator for almost 20 years.

Archetypes of Mythology

by Stefan Stenudd
This book examines Jungian theories on myth and religion, from Carl G. Jung to Jordan B. Peterson. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

Psychoanalysis of Mythology

by Stefan Stenudd
This book examines Freudian theories on myth and religion, from Sigmund Freud to Erich Fromm. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

His literary debut was with The Artist in 1907, which presented a psychoanalytical perspective on artists. That continued to be one of his favorite themes, along with finding psychoanalytical patterns in myths.

Already in 1906, he was hired as a secretary for the Psychological Wednesday Society, later renamed the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, although he still lacked a university degree.^[1] Encouraged by Freud, he reached his PhD with The Lohengrin Saga in 1911.

That was the very first dissertation to apply a psychoanalytical method.

It was with his 1924 book The Trauma of Birth that he fell out of grace with Freud and his group of psychoanalysts. They criticized the book for deviating from Freudian dogma. Rank left the organization and Vienna, moving first to Paris and later to the USA. He died at the age of 55 in 1939, just a month after the death of Sigmund Freud.

The Birth of the Hero

In 1909, Otto Rank published The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, where he went through a number of myths, fairy tales and ancient works of fiction to extract a common pattern regarding the birth and emergence of hero figures. He found this:

The standard saga itself may be formulated according to the following scheme:
The hero is the child of most distinguished parents; usually the son of a king. His origin is preceded by difficulties, such as continence, or prolonged barrenness, or secret intercourse of the parents, due to external prohibition or obstacles. During the pregnancy, or antedating the same, there is a prophecy, in form of a dream or oracle, cautioning against his birth, and usually threatening danger to the father, or his representative. As a rule, he is surrendered to the water, in a box. He is then saved by animals, or by lowly people (shepherds) and is suckled by a female animal, or by a humble woman. After he has grown up, he finds his distinguished parents, in a highly versatile fashion; takes his revenge on his father, on the one hand, is acknowledged on the other, and finally achieves rank and honors.^[2]

Later in the book he gives the pattern a more comprised form:

Summarizing the essentials of the hero myth, we find the descent from noble parents, the exposure in a river, and in a box, and the raising by lowly parents; followed in the further evolution of the story by the hero's return to his first parents, with or without punishment meted out to them.^[3]

In the hundred pages of the book, Rank goes through a number of hero myths, also some fairy tales and fictional accounts, from the Babylonian king Sargon to Lohengrin. Among the many heroes are Moses, Oedipus (of course), Paris of Homer's Iliad, Perseus, Hercules, Romulus, Jesus, and Tristan of the epic poem by Gottfried of Strasbourg. Several of them fit right into Rank's structure, whereas for others he sometimes has to argue elaborately.

The most strained of those arguments is when he uses Freud's theory about reversal to claim that an account of events may be interpreted as its opposite.^[4]

Though sketching a few theories of explanation to this pattern of the hero myths, Rank is not interested in that aspect, nor does he care much for trying to trace the origin of the hero myth:

Of course no time will be wasted on the futile question as to what this first legend may have been; for in all probability this never had existence, any more than a 'first human couple.'^[5]

Instead, he concentrates on how the pattern and its ingredients should be understood from a psychoanalytical standpoint, much like Karl Abraham did in Dreams and Myths, which was published the same year and referred to in Rank's text.^[6] Rank uses similar arguments and also finds his major source in Freud's book on dream interpretation. He defines the myth as a dream of the masses of the people.^[7]

Myths are expressions of human imagination, especially that of the childish mind since "this imaginative faculty is found in its active and unchecked exuberance only in childhood."^[8] Therefore, Rank argues, the myths mainly express the psychological urges of children, also those of psychoneurotic adults, who are shown by the teachings of Freud to have remained children, in a sense.^[9]

In these adults, the childish emotions are preserved and exaggerated, which make them easier to analyze than the somewhat chaotic minds of children. So, the child inside the adult is revealed by the myth he composes:

Myths are, therefore, created by adults, by means of retrograde childhood fantasies, the hero being credited with the myth-maker's personal infantile history.^[10]

The mentally healthy adults, on the other hand, leave the childish sentiments behind, at least for the most part, to break free of the parents and form their own lives. But it is a straining process:

The detachment of the growing individual from the authority of the parents is one of the most necessary, but also, one of the most painful achievements of evolution.^[11]

In the mind of the child, though, the relation to the parents is one of affection leading to rivalry from feeling neglected. The child is upset for not constantly receiving the entire love of the parents. In hero myths, when the hero kills a powerful man standing in the way of his joining with his true love, he "kills in him simply the man who is trying to rob him of the love of his mother: namely the father."^[12]

Nourishing the idea of being a step-child or adopted, "usually under the influence of story books,"^[13] brings the child some relief. Echoing Freud's view on the sexes, Rank sees this tendency more prominent in boys than in girls: "The imaginative faculty of girls is possibly much less active in this respect." To no surprise, he presents no evidence of it.

The child's conception of not living with its real parents is fed by a wish to replace them:

The entire endeavor to replace the real father by a more distinguished one is merely the expression of the child's longing for the vanished happy time, when his father still appeared to be the strongest and greatest man, and the mother seemed the dearest and most beautiful woman.^[14]

Rank calls it an example of family romance, and sees in it the link between the ego of the child and the hero myth, which explains "the unanimous tendency of family romances and hero myths."^[15] Myths mirroring this childish idea have two parental couples — the biological ones and the step-parents — but they are really identical.

When puberty approaches, an element of ambition emerges in the child, with the wish to replace the parents who are now despised with others of a higher social rank.^[16] This is also shown in the pattern of the hero myth, where his hostility is mainly targeted at the father.^[17] The hero's rebellion against the father is explained as inevitable, often even commendable. That becomes an excuse for the revolt against the father in general, a relief of which the individual is in dire need: "This revolt had burdened him since his childhood, as he had failed to become a hero."^[18]

Rank ends his text by comparing the hero myth to the mentality of the anarchist, claiming that "every revolutionary is originally a disobedient son, a rebel against the father."^[19] The anarchist may follow in the footsteps of the hero when persecuting or even killing a king, but for both the true motivation can be questioned:

As the hero is commended for the same deed, without asking for its psychic motivation, so the anarchist might claim indulgence from the severest penalties, for the reason that he has killed an entirely different person from the one he really intended to destroy, in spite of an apparently excellent perhaps political motivation of his act.^[20]

One Can Dream

Certainly, there are many similarities between all kinds of myths from different times and cultures, whether they tell a hero's story or not.

There are also differences. Not even all the myths Rank lists in his book have the set of patterns he claims to be true for hero myths.

In spite of that, he makes no particular effort to explain why some of those myths lack one or more of those ingredients. Nor is he completely convincing when he argues for similarities where a reader must initially doubt them.

In his eagerness to point out psychological significances according to the Freudian doctrine, he is quick to allow things to represent something other than what meets the eye. For example, he explains the frequent event of a baby put in some vessel in a river or lake:

The exposure in the water signifies no more and no less than the symbolic expression of birth. The children come out of the "water." The basket, box or receptacle simply means the container, the womb.^[21]

In an accompanying footnote he adds that the box is in some myths represented by a cave, which also symbolizes the womb. As symbols go, they are quite obvious, but they raise the question why a baby, already born, would go through such a reenactment. To explain this, he actually uses Carl G. Jung. In 1909, when Rank published his text, Jung had not yet become persona non grata among the Freudians.

According to Jung, he explains, this mythical component is "the fantasy of being born again, to which the incest motive is subordinated."^[22] This wish of returning to the mother's womb and rebirth from it is something Jung wrote about more than once. Still, it is strange that a baby would need that rebirth process. In the paradoxical worlds of myths and dreams, it would be just as plausible to have a grown man go through it — and that would make more psychological sense.

Some of Rank's patterns of hero myths are uncontroversial, such as the very common theme of a boy from meager circumstances growing up to get the princess and half the kingdom. Countless fairy tales tell the same story. No mystery there. Anyone who was not already from birth blessed with these fortunes would be charmed by the prospect. There is no psychological need for it to be an expression of father-envy.

Simply put, a much wider audience would find it easier to identify with a hero born into poverty than one already vastly privileged from the start. The privileged have always been a minority, or it wouldn't be a privilege.

The same thing can be said for the plot of the commoner child revealed to be of utter nobility. It is a dream scenario in no need of a deeply frustrated relation to one's parents.

The frequent recurrence of those motifs is not more of a mystery than that we love to hear about someone winning the lottery but don't care much about one losing — although the latter is so much more common than the former.

The frequency in myths of a child abandoned by the parents, whether it is in a box on the water or in another manner, may seem peculiar at first, but it is tragically far from unheard of in real life. Through history, a multitude of children have been deserted by their parents, for different reasons and with different degrees of cruelty. It was a familiar occurrence to people of the past and sadly still is. A story aiming to describe the path from destitution to exaltation was likely to start with an abandoned child, so as to begin with utter misery.

In order to attract its audience, a story needs to work with extremes. Who cares about a prince growing up to be king, or a rich man's son inheriting the riches? It is what they do. But when a pauper gets to be king or a beggar strikes gold — that raises our eyebrows and our hopes, although we know it to be oh, so rare. We foster dreams about success because we would like to succeed. There is no hidden message to it.

What remains is the question of the hero's return to the original parents, either to elevate or to condemn them. It can easily be understood as tying the knots of the story.

If the hero was abandoned by his parents in the beginning of the story, the audience would want to know what happened to them. If they treated their child cruelly, we would expect vengeance. But if they left their child out of unfortunate necessity, we want reconciliation. It is for the sake of completing the story, and not an expression of some unconscious dynamics between children and parents.

Rank's psychoanalytical approach to hero myths is not implausible, but improbable compared to the primary principles of a narrative. A story has its own necessities and mechanics that should not be neglected in the analysis of it. When that has been considered, little remains to justify the psychoanalytical explanation of it.

Although Rank's conclusions about the hero myth have their flaws, he must be credited for being so early among the psychoanalysts to pay attention to it and recognizing its significance. Later, it would be the archetype of central importance to Jung, and after that even more famously of Joseph Campbell.

The Interpretation of Dreams

The outstanding evidence of Freud's great appreciation of Otto Rank was that he allowed his apprentice to contribute to a new edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, which was Freud's major work. The 4^th edition, published in 1914, contains two texts by Rank and even credits him as a co-writer of the book. The two chapters written by Rank are "Dreams and Poetry" and "Dreams and Myth."^[23]

When Rank fell out of Freud's grace after deviating from his doctrine in the mid-1920's, it was proven by the same chapters being omitted from the following edition of the book — the 8^th, released in 1930 — without any explanation. They have not reappeared in the book since. Below, a translation of the two texts from the 7^th edition of 1922 is used.

Dreams and Poetry

The first of those texts, "Dreams and Poetry," starts by comparing dreams to the creation of poetry, stating that there are "deeper connections between the exceptional abilities of 'sleepers' and the 'inspired' soul."^[24] Rank then uses a bundle of quotes mainly from poets to show their inklings of the functions and meanings of dreams in ways similar to Freud's doctrine. It is their poetic inspiration leading them to these realizations:

All these insights into the nature of dreams, which we have combined into a dream theory close to the psychoanalytic conception, are actually just incidental by-products of the intuitive psychic knowledge that the poet displays artistically in his creations.^[25]

By this somewhat haphazard method, Rank claims to find poets confirming a number of Freudian principles: wish-fulfillment, dreams as guardians of sleep, dream mood change through reversal of affect, suppressed erotic impulses, secret wishes suppressed in childhood, the Oedipus complex and its incest fantasy, and even the strange concept of reversal.

In the last case he takes support from the Swedish author August Strindberg, quoting him about the theosophist notion that things observed from the astral plane look upside down: "That is why dreams are often to be interpreted in reverse, through antiphrasis, and in Swedenborg there is an indication of this perverted way of seeing things."^[26]

Rank takes evident delight in this support from Strindberg, and from others, for Freudian dream analysis:

It is especially fascinating for the psychoanalyst to see for himself how dreams presented as poetry or in poetry are constructed according to the laws that have been established empirically and stand before psychoanalytic observation as actually experienced dreams.^[27]

He also touches on the link between daydreams and the creative artistic process. He sees them as an intermediate area between the dream world and poetry. While the daydreams correspond to undistorted dreams, truthfully revealing unconscious cravings, the poems in their edited and adjusted forms are idealized versions.^[28]

The primary problem with his speculations lies in the method of gathering quotes from the veritable cornucopia of our literary history. From such an abundance of material it is easy to find confirmations for just about any theory — or dismissal of it.

Standing out from the minds of the poets is not so much the meanings of dreams as their meaninglessness. Actually, this is something dreams are said to share with life as a whole. Shakespeare has Prospero say in The Tempest: "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."^[29] Edgar Allan Poe agrees:

All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.^[30]

So did, famously, with a particular twist, the Chinese Taoist Chuang Tzu in the 4^th century BC, when waking up from dreaming he was a butterfly. He was not sure if it was he who had dreamt about being a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming of being him.^[31] Chuang Tzu goes on to insist that there must be a difference, and calls it "the Transformation of Things."

Poe, too, had his ideas about the true nature of dreams and their relation to what we call reality:

I believe man to be in himself a Trinity, viz. Mind, Body, and Soul; and thus with dreams, some induced by the mind, and some by the soul. Those connected with the mind, I think proceed partly from supernatural and partly from natural causes; those of the soul I believe are of the immaterial world alone.^[32]

August Strindberg, quoted by Rank on the reversal of dreams, wrote a whole play as if consisting of a dream, simply called The Dream Play. In a short introduction to it, which he called "A Reminder," Strindberg explains to have imitated "the disconnected but seemingly logical form of the dream."^[33] He continues:

Anything may happen; everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist. On an insignificant background of reality, imagination designs and embroiders novel patterns: a medley of memories, experiences, free fancies, absurdities and improvisations.

That does not leave much room for a psychoanalytical interpretation to claim having the definite answer.

Dreams and Myth

Rank's second chapter, "Dreams and Myth," is a mere 17 pages and does little more than repeat what he and Karl Abraham had stated about the psychology of myths, as discussed above.

He begins by declaring that dreams are significant for the formation of myths and fairy tales.^[34] That would necessarily make myths as personally specific as dreams are, but Rank then speaks of a folk psychology creating myths from a culturally shared history and symbolism. There is "a genetic perspective that allows us to conceive of myths as the distorted remnants of wishful fantasies of entire nations, as it were the secular dreams of mankind in its youth."^[35] Still, it is all rooted primarily in the personal relation to parents, sexuality, and the Oedipus complex.

For some myths, this relation is near at hand, but less obvious in other cases. To Rank it means that the myth has been distorted. As an example of this, he mentions the widespread "brother tales," which simply substitute the brother for the father in the same old Oedipal rivalry. But then there are brother tales where one avenges the other. That would be an anomaly, but Rank explains it:

Comparative myth research, in connection with the psychoanalytic mode of observation, makes it possible to uncover, from the heavily distorted versions in which the brother appears as his brother's avenger, a continuous chain of links to less distorted versions in which one brother removes another in order to win the latter's woman.^[36]

The explanation is as convenient as it is questionable. He gives no example of how the tale of an avenging brother would really be such a rivalry, when stripped bare. He is wise not to try. The rivalry between brothers is not unheard of in any culture — nor is the loyalty to the death between them. There is not just one way in which their relation could play out, either in their unconscious wishes or in real life.

Rank also touches on creation myths, which he regards from a psychoanalytical perspective as "infantile sexual curiosity concerning birth processes and its attempts, projected onto the universe, to attain knowledge."^[37] Then certainly the common creation myth motif of world-parents killed by their son reflects "all the ur-motifs of the infantile Oedipus complex in a wider sense."

The influence between dreams and myths is reciprocal. Rank mentions the psychoanalytical experience that people's dreams may make use of familiar themes from fairy tales:

There are dreams whose function is to depict current psychic manifestations of certain fairy-tale themes known from childhood.^[38]

This points out the problem of the chicken and the egg as applied to dreams and myths. Like so much in the complexity of human thought and interaction, it is not a one-way street. So, there is not much point in trying to find one sole origin — just like it is pointless, according to Rank, trying to find the first human beings.

In a humble footnote Rank states something of fundamental importance, unfortunately without expanding on it. Discussing Aethiopica by Heliodorus, where Thyamis has a dream right when the rooster crows, Rank explains: "Dreams toward morning were held to be true."^[39]

That is the hypnopompic state of lucid dreaming at the moment of waking up, which is discussed in the chapter about Erich Fromm. Psychoanalysts should really ask themselves if not these types of dreams are the only ones to which they have ever had access. Since we are unable to remember dreams without waking up from them, maybe those we do remember are all created more or less by the conscious mind at the process of waking up.

The Trauma of Birth

In 1924 Otto Rank released the book that would exclude him from Freud's entourage and soon also from Freud's support — The Trauma of Birth, where Rank claimed the experience of birth to be the first and foremost human trauma. Thereby, he dethroned the Oedipus complex from that position, albeit indirectly. So, the reaction from Freud and his loyal followers was no surprise.

It was a surprise to Rank, though, judging from the explicit and repeated reverence he shows Freud in the book. It is close to worship. He ends his preface by humbly declaring that "we owe to the instrument of investigation and to the way of thinking which Freud has given us in Psychoanalysis."^[40] Through the text, Freud is praised for his "power of observation," which is "brilliant," "keen," and "clear," as is his thought. His accomplishment is "stupendous," his objectivity is "remarkable," and his discovery has "courage."^[41]

Although Rank's theory of the birth trauma contradicts Freud's doctrine to quite some extent, he never even once states so, nor does he raise any other objection to Freud's ideas. He refers to Freud's theories and discoveries as nothing less than canonical.

Rank's belief in Freud's continued support is ironic, considering how he time and again criticizes Jung and towards the end of the book speaks, with evident reference to him, about "single fellow-workers" who were close to Freud but took to flight:

Whatever of value they found as a refuge on their ways of retreat, Freud has distinguished with remarkable objectivity from the distortions and denials of the truth only imperfectly divined; but at the same time he has eliminated them from his own field of work as not really "psychoanalytic."^[42]

All this praise of Freud was to no avail. What befell Jung a dozen years earlier would with this book strike Rank. He was soon out in the cold, too.

Regardless of its deviation from Freudian doctrine, Rank's theory about the birth trauma is interesting. If there is any natural occurrence that we all share, which would have the potency of causing a trauma from early infancy and on, the moment of birth is the most likely candidate. It is a passage with the dignity only comparable to what awaits at the other end of life. Rank calls it the ultimate biological basis of the psychical.^[43] We carry with us the traumatic experience of birth and long for what was before it — the comfort and peace of the mother's womb.

The longing back to the womb was also suggested by Rank's fellow disciple of Freud at the time, Sándor Ferenczi, in Versuch einer Genitaltheorie,^[44] published the same year as Rank's book. It is referred to in Rank's text, though using a congress report from 1922.^[45] Rank expresses admiration for Ferenczi's claim that "the man, penetrating into the vaginal opening, undoubtedly signifies a partial return to the womb."

Rank does not insist that the birth trauma is based on an actual memory of the event. It could just as well be what he calls a primal phantasy, "it is a matter of indifference whether the scene was experienced or not."^[46]

Rank's purpose with his book is to arrange synthetically "the whole psychical development of man as shown from the analytically recognized importance of the birth trauma and in the continually recurring attempts to overcome it."^[47] But he gets carried away. Rank sees the birth trauma and the longing back to the womb symbolically represented by just about everything in human culture and thought:

We have recognized from the analytic situation and the patient's unconscious representation of it the fundamental importance of the birth trauma, its repression and its return in neurotic reproduction, symbolic adaptation, heroic compensation, ethical reaction formation, aesthetic idealization, and philosophic speculation.^[48]

His studies of mythology have convinced him that "the human problem of birth stands actually at the centre of mythical as of infantile interest and determines conclusively the content of phantasy formations."^[49] Cosmology, as it meets us not only in myths, is "nothing other than the infantile recollection of one's own birth projected on to Nature." Actually, "the whole process of culture, as reflected in myths, is only a human creation of the world on the pattern of one's own individual creation."^[50]

It is not unreasonable to see the expulsion from Paradise as a symbol of the birth trauma,^[51] maybe also to regard the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus as "a repetition and reproduction of the process of birth, ethically and religiously sublimated in the sense of a neurotic overcoming of the primal trauma."^[52] But explaining Nirvana, "the pleasurable Nothing," as "the womb situation" is stretching it.^[53] So is his over-simplified idea of religion, hardly applicable outside Christianity and maybe Islam:

Every form of religion tends ultimately to the creation of a succouring and protecting primal Being to whose bosom one can flee away from all troubles and dangers and to whom one finally returns in a future life which is a faithful, although sublimated, image of the once lost Paradise.^[54]

It does not end there. Rank claims that our need for sleep is because of the birth trauma, since it makes us spend so much of our lives "in a state similar to that of the intrauterine."^[55] And when we sleep, if the bedclothes slip off and we feel cold, it is "compensated for by a dream-like withdrawal into a symbolized womb."^[56]

Rank also has an explanation to homosexuality: "It is based quite obviously in the case of the man on the abhorrence of the female genitals, and this because of its close relation to the shock of birth."^[57] Why this abhorrence would only strike a minority of men, he neglects.

To the unconscious, any room and house symbolizes the womb,^[58] whereas all implements and weapons "really directly imitate the masculine sexual organ."^[59]

Even death itself is to the unconscious an everlasting return to the womb.^[60]

Rank makes more sense, relatively speaking, when he uses his theory on astrology:

One might even describe astrology as the first doctrine of the birth trauma. The entire being and fate of man is determined by what occurs (in heaven) at the moment of his birth.^[61]

Applying his theory to myth and fairy tales, Rank has no trouble finding examples, some of which have already been mentioned. He explains the wooden horse used against Troy, "the only possible form of fulfilment for the Unconscious was the return into the animal-like womb."^[62] The frog in the Frog-Prince fairy tale somehow represents both the penis and the fetus.^[63] The setting sun is conceived "in the imagination of all races as the return of the sun to the womb (underworld),"^[64] and mountains "with their hollows and caves, with their forests (hair), were looked upon as a gigantic primal mother."^[65]

The hero, to whom Rank had already devoted a book, represents a type who "seeks to overcome an apparently specially severe birth trauma by a compensatory repetition of it in his deeds."^[66] Only the youngest of the brothers can be the hero, since no one after him has occupied the place, in the mother.^[67] Therefore, only he can return to it.

Touching on the Oedipus saga, Rank acknowledges Freud's principle of the Oedipus complex, but by introducing the man-swallowing sphinx into the equation he makes the birth trauma overrule the complex:

The Oedipus saga is certainly a duplicate of the Sphinx episode, which means psychologically that it is the repetition of the primal trauma at the sexual stage (Oedipus complex), whereas the Sphinx represents the primal trauma itself.^[68]

Freud's Reaction

Freud did not take long to rebut Rank's claims. In 1926, two years after Rank's book, he published Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, where he dismissed Rank's birth trauma all but completely. His main argument is that it is very unlikely for anyone to have a remaining sensory impression of the time of birth.^[69]

Freud also objects to the almost paradoxical elements of Rank's theory, which leave room for just about any interpretation:

Rank dwells, according as it suits him best, now on the child's recollection of its happy intra-uterine existence, now on its recollection of the traumatic disturbance which interrupted that existence; so that he is able to make almost any interpretation he pleases.^[70]

Next, Freud points out anomalies, such as childhood reaction to darkness. According to Rank, it would give the comforting sense of returning to the womb, while in reality it causes anxiety in the child. Freud concludes that "the earliest phobias of infancy cannot be directly traced back to impressions of birth."

Later in his book he states that his main objection to Rank's theory is that "it floats in the air instead of being based upon ascertained observations."^[71] Freud is not wrong there, but the same objection can be raised about a number of his own claims, as discussed earlier in this book.

Death, Though

Freud's major objection, about the birth not being memorable, is probable but not ascertained, as he himself admits. Rank, though, implies even more. Since his theory is based on not just the birth trauma but also the longing for a return to the mother's womb, it suggests some kind of memory of the time before birth. Without a pleasant memory of the existence in the womb, we can't long for a return to it.

It was not scientifically confirmed at the time of Rank's and Freud's books, but there are things the fetus perceives, especially at the time approaching birth. Its hearing is particularly developed, even to the point that it can recognize words and differentiate between voices.^[72] So, the basic condition for Rank's theory has actually been confirmed. But his idea of a birth trauma is still in need of confirmation, and his far-fetched applications of it are easily disproved.

Although we might have at least fragments of memories from our birth, even from the time preceding it, the question is if that would create a longing back to the womb. I dare say that the thought is absurd, if not revolting, to just about all of us. It would be like not wanting to live at all. In order to claim that a traumatic wish of that kind is strong in us all, Rank would have needed to present mightily convincing arguments. He did not.

Reading his book, it is hard to escape the impression that he was seduced by the simplicity and strong symbolism of his idea of the birth trauma. He wanted to make his theory as big as he felt it was good. And deep. Being a psychoanalyst, he also had to make it fit that paradigm, with its concept of neurosis and human frustration as the yoke we all carry. Add to that the presumed secret workings of the unconscious.

Of course, birth is a major event in our lives. The significance of our very first breath is only equaled by our last. So, there is no mystery in the symbol of it showing up in so much of what we think and do. That does not necessarily mean we have a traumatic relation to it. It happened and we survived it. We move on.

Rank would probably have made a better case for a fundamental trauma if he created it around our knowledge of our mortality. We all know that we will die, and there is no escaping it.

There are certainly many ingredients in myths and religious doctrines referring to birth, but so many more, with so much more amplitude, regarding death. We don't have to relive our birth in order to overcome it, but we do through life feel an increasing need to come to peace with the certainty of our approaching death. Some religions even have a comforting promise about that as their main attraction.

Looking at mythologies, it is certainly evident that they usually speculate about the birth of humankind as well as that of the whole world. The overwhelming majority of deities were also once born, but the big thing about most of them is that contrary to men they do not die. That is the decisive trait setting them apart from humans. Some deities, such as Yahweh, have not even been born but were around forever. Still, their lack of birth matters little, since they exist. The thing is that they will continue to exist forever.

It is clearly pointed out in the religious source most familiar to Freud and all his disciples, which is the Bible. When Yahweh finds that Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit, he hurries to expel them from the garden so that they do not get to eat of the fruit that will make them immortal. It would make them his equals.^[73] And Christianity is built on the idea that Jesus died for our sins, though he was not dead for more than a couple of days. After that, being divine, he does not die anymore.

It is all about death, and not birth. Each of the four Gospels portrays the death of Jesus in detail, but only two of them speak of his birth (and childhood) at all.^[74] Even the expression "born-again Christian" is meaningful because of the promise that it leads to eternal life beyond the moment of death. Without this feature, the rebirth would be a short-lived solace.

The scarce psychoanalytical focus on death causing frustration is surprising. It may stem from the fact that there is no analytical method to avoid it, probably not even to come to terms with it. It is a quest on which each of us is fundamentally alone, where a therapist has little to contribute.

The Double

But Rank did write a book where death and the fear of it are discussed: The Double, first published in 1914, revised and expanded in 1925, the year after The Trauma of Birth was originally released. In this book he traces the concept of a double, as in a shadow or soul or guardian angel, through superstitious beliefs, myths, and fiction.

He sees this phenomenon as a narcissistic expression, one that reached obsessive proportion in several of our great authors. E. T. A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky are among the ones examined.

The fascination with this double can become a fixation, and ultimately lead to death. Rank lists plenty of old superstitions and legends from many cultures, which warn about the danger of seeing one's double, be it in a vision or in a mirror — like the tragic fate of Narcissus caught by his reflection in the water. The double is a dangerous acquaintance. Rank quotes E. T. A. Hoffmann:

It is the phantom of our own Self, whose intimate relationship with, and deep effect upon, our spirit casts us into hell or transports us into Heaven.^[75]

To Rank, the double is in essence the narcissistic adoration of oneself and none other. Of course, the greatest threat to the narcissist is erasure of the self, as in death. It is not that death as such is feared, but the idea that it will erase the self, which can become so unbearable to the narcissist that he paradoxically commits or at least considers suicide to end the torment:

Thus we have the strange paradox of the suicide who voluntarily seeks death in order to free himself of the intolerable thanatophobia.^[76]

The only salvation would be if somehow the self could survive death. This is precisely what many conceptions of the double imply, be it the shadow or the soul or something similar. Death takes one of the two, but not both. The narcissist's self lives on in the double.

It is implied by Rank's reasoning that we all have at least a fragment of that narcissistic urge for self-preservation also into the beyond, and he sees it expressed loud and clear in society:

The primitive belief in souls is originally nothing else than a kind of belief in immortality which energetically denies the power of death; and even today the essential content of the belief in the soul — as it subsists in religion, superstition, and modern cults — has not become other, nor much more, than that. The thought of death is rendered supportable by assuring oneself of a second life, after this one, as a double.^[77]

Rank exaggerates when he insists that making this so-called narcissistic wish to preserve one's self is pathological. It can become so, when leading to neurotic behavior and even suicide. Basically, though, it is not only natural but essential for us to foster a fascination with what we are and what is inside of us as individuals, or we would be no more than lumps of meat. Like Oblomov, in Ivan Goncharov's 1859 novel with the same name, we would not even leave our beds.

Through human history, there have been many beliefs in the ever after, and almost as many proposed reasons for them, psychological or in other terminologies. Rank points to the need itself and how it is expressed. It is indeed worth pondering, since this need evidently sidetracks reason and frequently makes people reject even the basic instinct of bodily survival.

The deep urge to preserve the self eternally gives clues to how we perceive ourselves — unique and irreplaceable. It also hints at what we need to make our lives meaningful, as well as why we need to do so. Surely, some of the finest human accomplishments in history — and some of the worst — have been nourished by this need.

The idea of a double is not far-fetched, nor is an intensified or even hallucinatory impression of one. Rank mentions the actual shadow that light makes appear beside us as one phenomenon stimulating the belief in a double. But it is doubtful that even primeval man would take very long figuring out the cause of the shadow and how it operates. Furthermore, primeval man could see it formed beside even inanimate objects. Fantasies about that physical shadow are more likely to have been amusements, or symbols not meant to be taken literally.

What is much more relevant to the idea of the double is the fact that we are able not only to separate ourselves from everything and everyone in our surroundings, but also to reflect upon ourselves and our actions as if being our own audience — and critic, as the psychoanalysts have told us in so many words. As we live our lives, we continuously observe and contemplate ourselves. That is indeed a double.

Another one is the self in our dreams. It is not the same one as the person walking around when we are awake, since that one lies still. The mystery of our dreams must be one of the most influential phenomena in creating all kinds of beliefs and conceptions of an immaterial reality. It is another double, and the most puzzling one. Primeval man must have wondered if that self died when the awake self did. At least it was open to speculation, since the truth of the matter was impossible to ascertain.

With this book of his, Rank touches on several perspectives of great interest to the study of the human condition. It is significant that he does so with much less of the psychoanalytical terminology and apparatus, than in his books previously discussed. He finds more use for concepts borrowed from art and poetry, from mythical concepts themselves rather than psychoanalytical translations of them. That speaks to his advantage.

Otto Rank's thoughts about the double as well as those about the birth trauma are interesting, and his ability to target such essential concepts of the human psyche was impressive. Who knows what they would have led him to, if he were not so tied up by Freud's doctrine, even when dismissed by his teacher? Sadly, he died so soon after Freud did, there was no time for him to explore the freedom it must have given his mind.

Notes

Dan Merkur, Psychoanalytic Approaches to Myth: Freud and the Freudians, New York 2005, p. 20. ↑
Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero: A Psychological Interpretation of Mythology (Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden: Versuch einer psychologischen Mythendeutung, 1909), transl. F. Robbins and Smith Ely Jelliffe, New York 1914, p. 61. ↑
Ibid., p. 68. ↑
Ibid., p. 75. ↑
Ibid., p. 4 (footnote). ↑
Ibid., p. 7. ↑
Ibid., p. 6. ↑
Ibid., p. 62. ↑
Ibid., p. 63. ↑
Ibid., p. 82. ↑
Ibid., pp. 63f. ↑
Ibid., p. 77. ↑
Ibid., p. 65. ↑
Ibid., p. 67. ↑
Ibid., p. 68. ↑
Ibid., p. 65. ↑
Ibid., p. 74. ↑
Ibid., p. 82. ↑
Ibid., p. 93. ↑
Ibid., p. 94. ↑
Ibid., pp. 69f. ↑
Ibid., p. 83. ↑
Lydia Marinelli & Andreas Mayer, Dreaming by the book: Freud's interpretation of dreams and the history of the psychoanalytic movement, transl. Susan Fairfield, New York 2003 (originally published in German 2002), pp. 191f. ↑
Otto Rank, "Dreams and Poetry," Marinelli & Mayer 2003, p. 193. ↑
Ibid., p. 205. ↑
Ibid., p. 200. ↑
Ibid., p. 207. ↑
Ibid., p. 218. ↑
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV, Scene I. ↑
Edgar Allan Poe, "A Dream within a Dream," J. H. Whitty, The Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Boston 1917, p. 123. ↑
James Legge, The Sacred Books of China: The Texts of Taoism, part 1, Oxford 1891, p. 197. ↑
Edgar Allan Poe, "An Opinion on Dreams," originally published in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, August 1839. J. H. Whitty, The Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Boston 1917, p. lxiii. ↑
August Strindberg, "The Dream Play," Plays by August Strindberg, transl. Edwin Björkman, New York 1912, p. 24. ↑
Otto Rank, "Dreams and Myth," Lydia Marinelli & Andreas Mayer, Dreaming by the book, p. 221. ↑
Ibid., p. 230. ↑
Ibid., p. 230. ↑
Ibid., p. 231. ↑
Ibid., p. 237. ↑
Ibid., p. 232, footnote. ↑
Otto Rank, The Trauma of Birth (originally published in German 1924), London 1929, p. xv. ↑
Ibid., pp. 2, 12, 106, 209, 183, 184. ↑
Ibid., p. 184. ↑
Ibid., p. xiii. ↑
It was translated to English five years after his death. Sándor Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, transl. Henry Alden Bunker, New York 1938. ↑
Rank, The Trauma of Birth, p. 39. ↑
Ibid., p. 194. ↑
Ibid., p. xiv. ↑
Ibid., p. 183. ↑
Ibid., p. 73. ↑
Ibid., pp. 85f. ↑
Ibid., p. 75. ↑
Ibid., p. 137. ↑
Ibid., p. 119. ↑
Ibid., p. 117. ↑
Ibid., p. 74. Rank writes that we spend half our lives asleep, which must be some kind of typo. ↑
Ibid., p. 78. ↑
Ibid., p. 35. ↑
Ibid., pp. 86 and 88. ↑
Ibid., p. 95. ↑
Ibid., p. 114. ↑
Ibid., p. 117, footnote. ↑
Ibid., p. 163. ↑
Ibid., p. 111, footnote. ↑
Ibid., pp. 74f. ↑
Ibid., p. 104. ↑
Ibid., p. 107. ↑
Ibid., p. 112. ↑
Ibid., p. 144. ↑
Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (originally published in German 1926), transl. Alix Strachey, London 1936, p. 103. ↑
Ibid., p. 104. ↑
Ibid., p. 134. ↑
Ferris Jabr, "Study of Fetal Perception Takes Off," Scientific American (scientificamerican.com), 2015. ↑
Genesis 3:22. ↑
The Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Mark and John commence with the baptism of Jesus as an adult. ↑
Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study (Der Doppelgänger: Eine Psychoanalytische Studie, 1925), transl. Harry Tucker jr., New York 1979, p. 69. ↑
Ibid., p. 78. ↑
Ibid., pp. 84f. ↑

Freudians on Myth and Religion

This text is an excerpt from my book Psychoanalysis of Mythology: Freudian Theories on Myth and Religion Examined from 2022. The excerpt was published on this website in February, 2026.

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