Concept
Birth trauma
Otto Rank's thesis that birth, as the infant's first and prototypical separation from the mother, is the source of all later anxiety. The wish to return to the womb, and the anxiety bound up with it, recur in his view in symptoms, in myth, religion and art, and in the analytic situation itself, whose ending repeats the separation; later conflicts such as the Oedipus complex appear as repetitions of this primal trauma.
introduced by
- Otto Rank 1924 Rank set out the birth trauma as the root of anxiety and of the unconscious in Das Trauma der Geburt (1924).
diverges from
- Oedipus complex 1924 Rank made the separation at birth, rather than the Oedipal conflict, the nucleus of the neuroses, treating the Oedipus complex as a later repetition of it.
critiqued by
- Sigmund Freud 1926 In Hemmung, Symptom und Angst Freud kept birth as the prototype of anxiety but rejected Rank's claim that it explains the neuroses.