Otto Rank, The Incest Motif in Wagner, translated by Anthony Negus, introduced and edited by Christopher Wintle

March 2021, Volume 15, Number 1, 32–42.

Born in Vienna in 1884, Otto Rank first met Sigmund Freud in 1905 and became secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1906. As Freud’s assistant for about twenty years, he co-edited ‘Zeitschrift and Imago’ (a series devoted to applied psychoanalysis). But in his own right he was one of the most prominent, brilliant and productive members of his circle, and alongside psychology showed a marked orientation towards literature, mythology and philosophy: he had taken a PhD from Vienna University, published as ‘The Lohengrin Legend’ in 1911, and contributed two chapters on myth to certain editions of Freud’s ‘Interpretation of Dreams’ (first published in 1900). His early works include the pithy ‘Myth of the Birth of the Hero’ (1909) and the expansive ’Incest in Myth and Legend’ (1912, revised in 1926) – myth, for Rank, being as vital a cultural background as it was for Jung.