The Trauma of Birth

By Otto Rank

Book Overview

2010 Reprint of 1952 Edition. First published in 1924, Otto Rank's The Trauma of Birth took as its starting point a note that Freud added to his The Interpretation of Dreams: "Moreover, the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety". Rank set out to identify "the ultimate biological basis of the psychical," the very "nucleus of the unconscious" (p. xxiii). For him this was the physical event of birth, whereby the infant passes from a state of perfectly contented union with the mother to a state of parlous separation via an oppressive experience of asphyxiation, constriction, confinement in the vaginal canal, and so on-all feelings recognizable in anxiety states of every kind. It was the struggle against this traumatic experience of birth, in Rank's account, that structured the fantasy life of the child, including the disavowal of the difference between the sexes, infantile sexual theories, and oedipal scenarios. Castration anxiety was a defensive derivative of the anxiety associated with the birth trauma.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1578989760
• ISBN13: 9781578989768
• Release Date: September 2010
• Publisher: Martino Fine Books
• Length: 242 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Merger

This little book has big ideas about our need to merge and the various ways we spend our lives defending against that original loss and its infinite repetitions throughout life. Rank, shunned by Freud, was a thinker of the top order, popularized by the brilliant Ernest Becker in the 70s, and well worth reading in his original form.

A key book in the history of psychotherapy

This edition contains an introduction by E. James Lieberman, biographer of Otto Rank (_Acts of Will_) and co-translator of Rank's _Psychology and the Soul_(1998). This work marks the break between Rank and Freud; written in 1924, it established the mother-child relationship as the central focus in human development. People forget that Freud's psychology was father-centered. Some critics feel that Rank exaggerated the birth trauma in the physical sense, but his thesis is about separation and individuation, now mainstream concepts (cf. Mahler, Bowlby, Erikson). Freud initally praised the book as the best thing since the invention of psychoanalysis--but soon he backed away, and by 1926 Rank left Vienna for Paris and then New York.