Short answers, pulled from the story.
Otto Rank was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, and philosopher, born Otto Rosenfeld in Vienna in 1884 and died in New York City on the 31st of October 1939. He was one of Sigmund Freud's closest collaborators and served as secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, the movement's first salaried post.
Otto Rank broke with Freud after publishing Das Trauma der Geburt, The Trauma of Birth, in 1924. The book argued that the anxiety of birth precedes the Oedipus complex, coined the term "pre-Oedipal," and challenged Freud's view that the Oedipus complex is the nucleus of neurosis and culture.
The Trauma of Birth, published in 1924, argued that the shock of separation at birth shapes art, myth, religion, and therapy before the Oedipus complex forms. It proposed a pre-Oedipal stage and centered psychological change on the relational experience of separation anxiety.
Otto Rank's relationship-centered therapy informed Jessie Taft and Frederick Allen, who developed the functional model at the Pennsylvania School of Social Work and introduced his ideas to Carl Rogers. Rogers credited Rank's New York lectures with shaping client-centered counseling, and Rank's work also influenced Gestalt therapy and existential and humanistic therapy.
Otto Rank treated neurosis as a failure of creativity rather than a retreat from sexuality, and he argued therapy should cultivate the creative will. He praised figures such as Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci for their willingness to reach "beyond the ideology which they have themselves fostered."
Ernest Becker drew on Rank's dialectic of "life fear" and "death fear," which later inspired terror management theory experiments by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. Rank's 1926 lecture "The Genesis of the Object Relation" anticipated object-relations perspectives and is linked to the ideas of Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott.