Otto Rank

Austrian psychoanalyst and Freud's closest associate for 20 years who broke with Freud over the centrality of the birth trauma, developing a will-based psychology that emphasized creativity, individuation, and the heroic self-creation of identity.

Proposed that the fundamental human anxiety is the birth trauma and that all psychological development involves the creative negotiation between fear of life (individuation) and fear of death (merger) — founding a will psychology that influenced existentialists, humanists, and Ernest Becker.