Otto Rank and The Trauma of Birth

Paul L. Sawyer, Professor of English, Cornell University

Footnote 13, Chapter 8, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

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In The Trauma of Birth (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1929), Otto Rank associated Ixion's wheel with fantasies of being enclosed perpetually in the womb. "The crime of these primal offenders [Ixion, Tantalus, Sisyphus] generally consists in rebellion against the highest of the gods, usually caused by the desire for his wife, the primal mother, as in the case of Ixion, who, moreover, is the first murderer of relations" (p.133).

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Last modified December 2000