Otto Rank, one of Sigmund Freud's original followers, posited the existence of an "urge to immortality" as man's deepest drive. In his Psychology and the Soul, Rank traced the desire for immortality through four historical eras, with particular emphasis on the creativity of the hero and the artist. By the end of his life, Rank had not only repudiated orthodox psychoanalysis and developed then abandoned a psychology of the will, he had moved "beyond psychology" to a religious view of history and the nature of man.
Otto Rank, the psychoanalyst turned philosopher of history, considered the "urge to immortality" to be man's deepest drive. In place of the universal importance of the sexual instinct in psychoanalysis, Rank, who broke with Sigmund Freud in 1926, emphasized the urge to immortality. Rank believed that the will strives for immortality through a wide variety of paths. Immortality may seem much too lofty a word to describe the mundane fact that man cloaks his fear of life and death in the most ingenius and grandiose fantasies. However, as Rank applied it, the term immortality is metaphysically neutral. According to Rank, the urge to immortality is nothing more than a psychic fact; however, he never dismissed the possibility that there may be a cosmic dimension of even greater significance behind the durable recurrence of the Rank's emphasis on the urge to immortality is the key to understanding many of his other positions. It explains why the artist, the creative personality who gives substance to the urge in his work, was the focus of Rank's attention from his first work to his last. It also explains why Rank refused to accept Freud's diagnosis of the artist as a neurotic sublimating his sexual drives. The emotional pressures resulting from Rank's lingering conflict between his own creative impulses and his support of the philosophy of orthodox psychoanalysis led him to seek outlets for his personal creativity, and in 1924 he published The Trauma of Birth,' which precipitated his break with Freud two years later.
Once the split was solidified in 1926, Rank moved toward a "will psychology" which marked his rejection of the psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious. Between 1925 and 1929, Rank produced two works consisting of three volumes each that are important because they represent the transition between his Freudian stance and the important contributions of his painful years of fulfillment (1929)(1930)(1931)(1932)(1933)(1934)(1935)(1936)(1937)(1938)(1939). The first of these works was Techniques of Psychoanalysis, the second and third volumes of which have been translated into English under the title Will Therapy.l The other was his Outlines of a Genetic Psychology on the Basis of the Psychoanalysis of the Ego Structure, the third part of which was translated as Truth and Reality.8 After his break with Freud in Vienna, Rank spent the years 1926 to 1934 in Paris and 1934 to 1939, the year of his death, in New York City. According to Jessie Taft, these years were characterized by a "compulsion to write." Will Therapy and Truth and Reality were initially products of "his urge."
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