SOURCE: “‘Art and Artist’—A Biographical Sketch,” in The Psychology and Psychotherapy of Otto Rank: An Historical and Comparative Introduction, Philosophical Library, 1953, pp. 3-17.

In the following essay, Karpf discusses ways in which Rank deviated from the Freudian approach to psychoanalysis, focusing on Rank's emphasis on artistic creativity.

Otto Rank was born in Vienna in 1884, the second of two sons in a comfortable middle-class family. His educational plans were originally directed toward an engineering career. But these plans were radically changed as a result of his first meeting with Freud. Recognizing an especially gifted student along psychological lines, Freud encouraged him to consider psychology as a career instead. Freud records the incident in interesting fashion in his paper “On the History of the Psycho-analytic Movement.”

Freud states that from the year 1902, regular meetings of a small group of his followers were held in his house. He describes Rank's...