Medicine: 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.