Heal Thyself?

Into the Vienna circle of pioneer psychoanalysts, Alfred Adler introduced an odd recruit in 1906. Unlike the Master, Sigmund Freud, and Adler himself (then chief disciple), the new convert was no mature physician but a green-fiery youth of 21 who had not even finished high school, and was making a poor living as a mechanic. His name: Otto Rank.

Freud took kindly to Rank, a fellow Viennese of underprivileged Jewish extraction, encouraged him to finish Gymnasium (equivalent to U.S. high school and junior college) and get a Ph.D. in psychology. Rank served as secretary of Vienna's informal analytic trust and head of its publishing activities. He presented pseudo-scientific papers at analytic congresses, won kudos from Freud as his superior in dream interpretation. When psychoanalysis made its heaviest impact on psychiatry and education just after World War I, Rank was a respected eminence in the top hierarchy, with vast power as a molder of minds. In these same 20-years he ran the gamut from infantile adulation of Freud, through emulation, to a break with the Master on matters of doctrine.*

One of Rank's most devoted disciples: Jessie Taft, psychologist and professor in the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Work. In Otto Rank (Julian Press; $6.50), Disciple Taft, 76 this week and retired, reveals the agonizing details of Rank's character that a dozen years of personal association and years of painstaking research have provided. In unsophisticated, pre-Freudian days, it would have been considered shocking that a man so disturbed should win such acceptance.

Sex at Six. Though Biographer Taft makes no claim to impartiality, she is painstakingly honest. Rank, she discloses, had a miserable childhood in a household where nobody spoke except in a scream. He suffered "joint rheumatism,'' which at 19 "caused a heart ailment." At 19, too, he wrote of the friend who had provided his first erotic experience (age six): "I still curse him even today."

Adolescent Rank was successively infatuated with Schopenhauer. Nietzsche and Wagner. Lonely, understood by nobody (a fact that Psychologist Taft makes thoroughly understandable). Rank early and arrogantly declared himself an "artist"--a designation that he viewed as equivalent to a patent of nobility. He also nominated himself a genius, appropriately became so tortured that he considered suicide (May 14, 1904: "Today I bought a weapon to kill myself").

Among Rank's chief qualifications for membership in Freud's Wednesday Psychological Society were an inordinate interest in sex. a self-appointed expertness in the interpretation of dreams, and an infinite capacity for making vast, galactic generalizations about the nature of man without an atom of fact to support them. Even Freud, a forgiving father-figure, saw the flaws in Rank's intellectual apparatus. It seemed to Freud that if Rank had had the discipline of studying for an M.D. degree, he would have learned enough about the scientific method of stay out of trouble.

Agony at Birth. With the hindsight afforded by Jessie Taft's searching study, it is clear that Freud himself was guilty of unscientific wishful thinking. Nothing interested Rank less than facts. Freud made him rewrite The Artist in 1907 because it was both sloppy and too sweeping. Freud became too busy to keep a tight rein on Rank; by 1923. the Master accepted the dedication of The Trauma of Birth without having half read the manuscript. This was the beginning of the end of Rank the Disciple, and marked his self-anointment as the messiah of a new cult (openly proclaimed in 1930). Its credo: virtually everything wrong with man results from the painful experience of birth. Later he proposed the idea--monstrous to orthodox Freudians --that patients in analysis must exercise will power.

In Rank's later years his behavior was more appropriate to the role of patient than of therapist. He went through one emotional crisis after another (diagnosed by famed Freud Biographer Ernest Jones as a mild manic-depressive psychosis), even suffered artist's and writer's "block" --a symptom that analysts claim to relieve most effectively. Of Rank's death from an infection (probably streptococcal in Manhattan's Polyclinic Hospital in 1939. Jessie Taft writes: "Always he feared drugs, and insisted that his organism refused to accept them. An undoubtedly irrational sense of the inviolability of his body as well as his spirit may have worked against a cure." One thing certain from Biographer Taft's candid pages: in the post-Freud patter of the cocktail hour, Otto Rank was "sick, sick, sick."

* Of the eight apostles who at various times were closest to Freud, four eventually defected: Alfred Adler and Carl G. Jung (by far the most famed of his followers), Rank, and Sandor Ferenczi (who has been called emotion ally disturbed).

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