EDUCATION (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -During the 1930s Rank developed a concept of the will as the guiding force in personality development. The will could be a positive force for controlling and using a person’s instinctual drives, which were seen by Freud as the motivating factors in human behaviour.

Detailed explanation-2: -Sigmund Freud viewed birth as the child’s first anxiety experience and the prototype of separation anxiety. To Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank (1884–1939), who first proposed the idea of birth trauma, it was the crucial factor in causing neuroses. The theory was subsequently disproven by infant research.

Detailed explanation-3: -Rank’s theory of emotions highlights anxiety as the affect of separation, and guilt as the feeling that binds the individual to others. His personality theory distinguishes between the partialist, who responds to life fear with identification, and the totalist, who responds to death fear with projection.

Detailed explanation-4: -Rank believed that the physical event of birth, where the infant moves from a state of perfect harmony and union with the mother into a painful state of separation resulting from the traumatic and violent circumstances of birth, constitutes the earliest anxiety that a human being experiences.