“The ‘Bad Mother’ Freud has Never Seen”: Otto Rank and the Birth of Object-Relations Theory

At heart a poet and writer, Otto Rank took much pleasure in giving literary gifts to his beloved Professor. On May 6, 1923, as a gift for Freud's sixty-seventh birthday, Rank presented the discoverer of psychoanalysis with his new manuscript: Das Trauma der Geburt. Its thesis was startling. Separation at birth from mother, both desired and feared, is the origin of neurosis, argued Rank, displacing fear of the oedipal father to a secondary—but still vital—place in the inner psychic world of the child. The relationship between mother and child is at the core of transference, said Rank, and forms a template for the analytic situation. The mother—child relation, in both its good and bad aspects, takes priority over the Oedipus complex. The main purpose of therapy is to help the patient be “re-born” (Rank, 1924/1994, p. 3) without too much guilt or anxiety for separating at the end phase from the analyst and, by implication, from worn-out parts of the self—internalized imagos.

Although biologically based, the birth trauma was also a universal symbol of the “I's” conscious discovery of itself and its painful separation first from the momentary assistant “I,” the mother, now the therapist-midwife. Going far beyond biology, The Trauma of Birth included rich chapters on the meaning of becoming human for symbolism, religion, art, and philosophy. For Rank, the birth of individuality is never completed. Individuation ends only with the trauma of dying, the final separation—the final castration. “At the moment of death, the body once more severs itself from the mother substitute, ‘Dame World,’ whose front is comely and beautifully formed,” wrote Rank, “but whose back is thought to be ugly and horrible” (p. 197).