Imagine a person whose home is their sanctuary. They've decorated it to suit their style, comfort and design sensibility. They have everything they need at hand: their favorite music, books, a place to lie down and sleep, to sit and read, a dog they never want to be without (that’s you, Busy!) They have their food delivered, and perhaps even grow vegetables on their window sills.

This is the place they are most content. So long as they're home, nothing will upset the balance.

But then, one day, the landlord comes and serves this person with an eviction notice. Soon, a marshal arrives and breaks down the door. Our friend has no idea what's happening. She's paid her rent on time, every month. She's lived here her entire life. She grabs her dog and holds on tight, but the marshal begins pulling her hands and the dog slips from her arms as she's violently forced out of her apartment, toward a different reality she cannot comprehend, or know, worrying she'll never return home or see her dog again.

The world outside burns her eyes with its blinding neon light, she's handled roughly, stripped, flipped over, smacked and assaulted by an arhythmic, discordant pressing, a painful weight filling up her ears. Nothing is soft anymore: it's cold, sterile, clinical, and she's passed from one stranger to another. She knows no one here, but they all seem to know her.

This happened to me.

It happened to you.

Birth is being evicted from the only home you've ever known.

This, according to the 20th century psychoanalyst, Otto Rank is the original human trauma.

That first separation is violent: we are moved from warmth into cold, from being merged inside another person to being separate and alone, from the known into the incomprehensible. Without warning, we are cast out and then spend the rest of our lives trying to get back home.

Otto Rank spent nearly two decades as Freud's most trusted disciple. He was secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, editor of its journals, and by most accounts one of the sharpest minds in a circle that included some of the sharpest minds in Europe. He was Freud’s intellectual son: a middle-class kid from Vienna who had shown up at twenty-one with a manuscript called Der Künstler "The Artist" that impressed Freud enough to become his protégé.

So when Rank, at age 40, published The Trauma of Birth in 1924, he wasn't some outsider throwing a grenade into psychoanalysis. He was one of the people who had helped build the thing from the inside.

His argument was that Freud had started in the wrong place. It wasn’t the Oedipal Complex that gave rise to the neurotic drive, it was birth itself.

While Freud was initially supportive, this disagreement would ultimately prove catastrophic for their relationship. By 1926, Rank's place in the movement was effectively gone. He moved to Paris, arriving at forty-two years old, and starting over, stripped of the identity he had spent his entire adult life building. He wouldn't settle permanently in New York until nearly a decade later, in the mid-1930s. The man who had been Freud's heir was now just a man: brilliant, displaced, and forced to discover who he was without the defining relationship of his life.

With the birth of his book, and his original, radical idea, Rank lost the institution that had given him his identity, the mentor who defined his intellectual life and his position in the psychoanalytic community.

Alone in the expansive unknown of one’s own becoming is where the fear of life blooms. We spend our lives fearing being separate and abandoned, but we also fear its opposite: being engulfed. Baked into the fear of life is a twin anxiety: the fear of death. We fear being individual and alone; we fear being consumed and enmeshed.

Most people, Rank observed, spend their lives being pulled between these two forces without necessarily having language for what is happening. We want to become ourselves, but becoming ourselves requires separation, and separation is frightening. We want to be free, but freedom requires us to leave behind some version of the person we already understand ourselves to be.

The neurotic person, his theory went, uses their will to remain in place, not to grow but to hold the current shape of their life.

Instead of using their energy to grow, they redirect it toward maintaining the present shape of their life. The fear of becoming more free and the fear of becoming less free becomes a prison we use to protect ourselves from any movement at all. This is how we stay stuck in identities that no longer serve us. It's how we remain stuck in life, in relationships, in careers, in friendships.

What makes this especially insidious is that the trapped identity is often built around suffering. The person who has been wronged and knows it, who has organized an entire inner life around that wrongness, faces something uniquely cruel: to heal would be to lose the injury, and the injury is the only story they have. The suffering is familiar, making the alternative scary.

To be well, to be free, to be genuinely different from who you've been, requires you to greet yourself as someone you've never met. Most people find that more frightening than staying stuck.

Sometimes not knowing who you are is safer than finding out.

Rank's ideas, which were largely ignored during his lifetime and not fully excavated until Ernest Becker built on them in The Denial of Death in 1973, are most useful when they're applied to the unremarkable texture of daily life; the ways people say they want change and then methodically prevent it.

What Rank would have said, is that the fear of life is not a pathology. It is a human universal. The question is: can you become curious about the fear instead of controlled by it? 

The therapy he developed, called Will Therapy, was about interrogating the present moment, rather than excavating the past. He believed that therapy should be a process of freeing people to take responsibility for their choices and direction their life was taking. People, he believed, should be directed by their own will.

We spend enormous energy becoming someone, and then we spend the rest of our lives defending that person against the next version of ourselves who wants to exist. 

Rank's question, the one he paid for with his entire professional life, with his friendship with Freud, with his exile from the movement he'd helped build was at what cost do we refuse to become who we are?

Until next week, I will remain…