The Language of Bion: A Dictionary of Concepts Book

Rank starts his proposition with Freud saying that All anxiety goes back originally to anxiety at birth.. The dyspnea one has to face the moment he leaves the eternal abode is the primal anxiety we faced, during primary trauma, the expulsion from paradise (mothers' womb represents a place where there was enough food, warmth and above all it was secure). The child has to cry at this helplessness which helps deliver the elixir (oxygen) to sustain life on earth outside that protective home. This trauma is so severe that it impacts his whole life, it requires few early years of childhood to overcome this trauma, and unconsciously child still has that primal anxiety produced by events and surroundings which resemble the mother's womb.

With time he accepts his fall from paradise in early adulthood (via different repressive processes like heroisms, fantasizing death as a process of reunion to the lost paradise and other symbolisms in arts, politics ) and those who can't overcome this anxiety, during development, show the same symptoms of childhood anxiety as neurosis. In the rest of the chapters, he applied the psychoanalytic process to explain different phobias, arts, religions, and concepts of death, etc, in light of his theory of birth trauma.