Otto Rank

Born Rosenfeld, Rank was Freud's closest early collaborator in Vienna, editing the movement's journals and running its Psychoanalytic Society before breaking decisively with his mentor. His 1924 book The Trauma of Birth argued that the anxiety of birth itself, not the Oedipus complex, shapes the psyche — a claim that cost him Freud's friendship but reoriented psychotherapy toward the relationship between therapist and client. Practicing later in Paris and New York, he insisted therapists show genuine warmth rather than clinical distance, an idea that fed directly into humanistic and existential therapy and social work.