The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2012, 72, (320–325) © 2012 Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis 0002-9548/12 www.palgrave-journals.com/ajp/ RANKIAN WILL E. James Lieberman Otto Rank (1884–1939) served as Freud’s closest partner in the psychoanalytic movement from 1906 to 1926. From 1923 on, Rank, initially with Ferenczi, focused on making analysis more therapeutic, emphasizing current experience in the session over historical exploration and inter- pretation. Rank settled on will as a missing factor, and wrote extensively about it after the break with Freud in 1926, when he moved to Paris. He emphasized the here-and-now, redefined “resistance” as a positive aspect of counter-will, and suggested a time limit for analysis. Ousted from analytic circles in 1930, he eventually moved to New York, continuing to treat patients and teach until his unexpected death at 55 in 1939. After decades of obscurity, Rank has gained readers and therapists whose orientation is interpersonal, client-centered, relational, humanistic, or existential. His influence on post-Freudian ego-psychology is finally being acknowledged as are his ideas about creativity, will, life-fear and death-fear, guilt, and ethics. KEY WORDS: will; creativity; psychotherapy; existentialism; guilt; ethics. DOI:10.1057/ajp.2012.20 Otto Rank (1884–1939) finished trade school in Vienna as a locksmith, while immersing himself in philosophy, psychology, and the arts. Having digested Freud’s key writings, he wrote an essay on psychoanalysis and the artist that led to his appointment as secretary of the nascent Vienna Psycho- analytic Society in 1906. He was 22, when Freud, 50, became his employer and mentor. While writing the minutes of the Wednesday night meetings, Rank finished academic high school and the University of Vienna, getting his Ph.D. in 1912 with a thesis on The Lohengrin Saga. Rank’s writing is complex and tangled, though brimming with ideas; Freud’s is a model of clear and compelling logic. Both men were smart, literate, and personable. Their relationship was, for two decades, the closest that either had outside his own family. Rank was plagued at times with a mood disorder that ranged from depression to mania. E. James Lieberman, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry (Emeritus), George Washington University, School of Medicine; Distinguished Life Fellow, American Psychiatric Association; Fellow, American Academy of Psychoanalytic and Dynamic Psychiatry. Address correspondence to E. James Lieberman, M.D., 8506 Wilkesboro Lane, Potomac, MD 20854; e-mail: ejl@gwu.edu