Theodor Reik

1888-1969

Lay analyst Theodor Reik was born on May 12, 1888, in Vienna, and died on December 31, 1969, in New York.

He was the third child of four born to the cultured, lower-middle-class Jewish family of Max and Caroline Reik. Reik's father was a low-salaried government clerk who died when Theodor was aged 18. Freud became a father figure for the rest of Reik's life. He attended public schools in Vienna and entered the University of Vienna at the age of 18, where he studied psychology and French and German literature. He received his PhD in 1912, writing the first psychoanalytic dissertation, on Flaubert's The Temptation of St. Anthony. He met Freud in 1910, and two years later became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. From 1914 to 1915 he was in analysis with Karl Abraham in Berlin and, with the outbreak of World War I, served as an officer in the Austrian cavalry from 1915 to 1918, seeing combat in Montenegro and Italy and being decorated for bravery.

Following the resignation of Otto Rank, Reik became the Secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. For ten years he practiced in Vienna and began to write so extensively that Freud asked him: "Why do you piss around so much? Just piss in one spot" (Natterson, 1966). Freud wrote "The Question of Lay Analysis" in defense of Reik, who had been prosecuted under the quackery laws of Austria for practicing medicine.

Reik moved to Berlin, where he lived and practiced from 1928 until 1934 and again was a celebrated teacher at the psychoanalytic institute. Fearing the rise of the Nazis, he left for The Hague, where he continued practicing and teaching. During this time his first wife Ella, mother of his son Arthur, died, and he married Marija. Two children were born of this marriage, Theodora and Miriam.

Still fearful of the Nazis, he moved to New York where, as a non-medical analyst, he was denied full membership in the New York Psychoanalytic Society. Reik would not accept the position of research analyst, although he could have made a "charade" of agreement and practiced, as many did. Reik experienced financial difficulties for many periods in his life. He was treated gratis by both Karl Abraham and Freud and for a time he received financial support of 200 marks a month from Freud. After he wrote for help in 1938, Freud wrote back: "What ill wind has blown you, just you, to America? You must have known how amiably lay analysts would be received there by our colleagues for whom psychoanalysis is nothing more that one of the hand-maidens of psychiatry" (Hale, 1995). Reik persevered, however, building a practice, and soon a group of colleagues centered around him and, in 1948, the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis was founded.

Reik's influence on the development of nonmedical analysis in the United States was great. Not only did his many books have a profound effect on the general reading public but his influence through the NPAP (National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis) and the institutes that split from it suggest that Reik was the major promulgator of non-medical analysis in the United States.

Reik's psychoanalytic studies include discussions of such writers as Beer-Hofmann, Flaubert, and Schnitzler as well as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Gustav Mahler, to name but a few. He had a unique way of communicating and his writing and conversational style was free associational. His autobiography is to be found in his many works. Among his better known are: Listening with the Third Ear (1948); the monumental Masochism in Modern Man (1949); Surprise and the Psychoanalyst (1935); his recollection of Freud, From Thirty Years with Freud (1940); an autobiographical study, Fragment of a Great Confession (1949); applied psychoanalysis of the Bible in Mystery on the Mountain (1958); anthropology in Ritual (1958); and sexuality in Of Love and Lust (1959), Creation of Woman (1960), and The Psychology of Sex Relations (1961); and music in The Haunting Melody (1960).

Toward the end of his life Reik, who grew a beard, resembled the older Freud and lived modestly, surrounded by photographs of Freud from childhood to old age. He died on December 31, 1969, after a long illness.

Natterson says, of Reik: "In many ways, Reik is the epitome of the sensitive aesthete, the pleasure-loving, erotic, highly intellectual, secular Jewish scholar. These characteristics are to be treasured" (Natterson, 1966).

Theodor Reik, disciple of Freud, Secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, author of over 20 books and hundreds of papers on literature, music, religion, analytic technique, and masochism, founder of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP) in New York, an analyst in four major cities who wrote in a confessional way about his life, loves, failures, and triumphs, occupies a unique place in the history of psychoanalysis.

Bibliography

Hale, Nathan G., Jr. (1995). The rise and crisis of psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans 1917-1985. New York: Oxford University Press.

Natterson, Joseph M. (1966). Theodor Reik: Masochism in modern man. In Franz Alexander, S. Eisensten, and Martin Grotjahn (Eds.), Psychoanalytic pioneers (pp. 249-264). New York and London: Basic.

—JOSEPH REPPEN

Quotes:

"In our civilization, men are afraid that they will not be men enough and women are afraid that they might be considered only women."

"He [Freud] often said three things were impossible to fulfill completely; healing, education, governing. He limited his goals in analytic treatment to brining the patient to the point where he could work for a living and learn to love."

"The man who has never made a fool of himself in love will never be wise in love."

"Even the wisest men make fools of themselves about women, and even the most foolish women are wise about men."

"Work and love; these are the basics. Without them there is neurosis."

"There are only two roads that lead to something like human happiness. They are marked by the words: love and achievement. In order to be happy oneself it is necessary to make at least one other person happy. The secret of human happiness is not in self-seeking but in self-forgetting."

See more famous quotes by Theodor Reik

memorial plaque, Berlin

Theodor Reik (12 May 1888 in Wien — 31 December 1969 in New York City) was a prominent psychoanalyst who trained as one of Freud's first students in Vienna, Austria. Reik received a PhD degree in psychology from the University of Vienna in 1912. His dissertation, a study of Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony, was the first psychoanalytic dissertation ever written. After receiving his doctorate, Reik devoted several years to studying with Freud, who financially supported Reik and his family during his psychoanalytic training. During this time, Reik was analyzed by Karl Abraham. Reik, who was Jewish, emigrated from Austria to the United States in 1938 in flight from Nazism. In 1944, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

Rejected from the dominant community of medical psychoanalysts in the United States because he did not possess an MD degree, Reik went on to found one of the first psychoanalytic training centers for psychologists, the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, which remains one of the largest and best-known psychoanalytic training institutes in New York City.

As part of Reik's conflict with the medical psychoanalysis community, he participated in the first lawsuit which helped define and legitimize the practice of psychoanalysis by non-physicians.

Reik is best known for psychoanalytic studies of psychotherapeutic listening, masochism, criminology, literature, and religion.

Reik's first major book was The Compulsion to Confess (1925), in which he argued that neurotic symptoms such as blushing and stuttering can be seen as unconscious confessions that express the patient's repressed impulses while also punishing the patient for communicating these impulses.

Reik further explored this theme in The Unknown Murderer (1932), in which he examined the process of psychologically profiling unknown criminals. He argued out that because of unconscious guilt, criminals often leave clues that can lead to their identification and arrest.

In Masochism in Modern Man (1941), Reik argues that patients who engage in self-punishing or provocative behavior do so in order to demonstrate their emotional fortitude, induce guilt in others, and achieve a sense of "victory through defeat."

Reik presented a forceful criticism of traditional Freudian theory in A Psychologist Looks at Love (1944). Freud had believed that love is always based on some form of sexual desire. Reik argued, to the contrary, that love and lust are distinct motivational forces.

In Ritual: Four Psychoanalytic Studies" (1946), he uses psychoanalytic te shed light on the meaning of couvade, puberty rites, and the Jewish rituals of Yom Kippur and shofar.

Reik's most famous book, Listening with the Third Ear (1948), describes how psychoanalysts intuitively use their own unconscious minds to detect and decipher the unconscious wishes and fantasies of their patients. According to Reik, analysts come to understand patients most deeply by examining their own unconscious intuitions about their patients.

In his psychoanalytic autobiography Fragments of a Great Confession (1949), Reik turned a psychoanalytic ear toward his own life, interpreting his inner conflicts and their influence on his writing and relationships.

The Secret Self (1952) comprises a number of essays of psychoanalytic literary criticism, in which Reik tried to decipher the unconscious fantasies and impulses lying beneath literary works. In this book, Reik continued to develop his interest in the relationship between his own personality and his work, exploring how his internal conflicts shaped his interpretations of literary works.

In Myth and Guilt (1957), Reik investigated the role of guilt and masochism in religion.

Reik's theories were a strong influence on the French psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan, and anticipated recent developments in US psychoanalysis, such as its current emphasis on intersubjectivity and countertransference. Reik's legacy for nonmedical psychoanalysis in the US is equally important. The training of nonmedical analysts, such as psychologists and social workers, is now largely accepted, partly because of Reik's efforts. It is also worth mentioning that the philosopher Frank P. Ramsey was his patient, during a prolonged stay in Vienna with that purpose.

Publications

• 1923: Der eigene und der fremde Gott. , Neuausgabe: Der eigene und der fremde Gott : zur Psychoanalyse d. religiösen Entwicklung, Mit e. Vorw. z. Neuausg. von Alexander Mitscherlich, Frankfurt (am Main) : Suhrkamp, 1975.
• 1925/1959 - The Compulsion to Confess. In J.Farrar (Ed) The compulsion to confess and the need for punishment. (pp. 176-356). New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy.
• 1932/1959 - The Unknown Murderer. In J. Farrar (Ed) The compulsion to confess and the need for punishment. (pp. 3-173). New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy.
• 1937 - Surprise and the Psycho-Analyst: On the Conjecture and Comprehension of Unconscious Process. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company.
• 1941 - Masochism and Modern Man. New York: Toronto, Farrar & Rinehart.
• 1944/1974 - A Psychologist Looks at Love. In M.Sherman (Ed.) Of Love and Lust. (pp.1-194) New York: Jason Aronson.
• 1946 - Ritual: Four Psychoanalytic Stidoes" 1962 Grove Press edition.
• 1948 - Listening with the Third Ear: The inner experience of a psychoanalyst. New York: Grove Press.
• 1952 - The Secret Self. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young.
• 1957 - Myth and Guilt. New York: George Braziller.
• 1959 - Mystery on the Mountain: The Drama of the Sinai Revelation. New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers.
• 1960 - The Creation of Woman: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry into the Myth of Eve. New York: George Braziller.
• 1961 - The Temptation. New York: George Braziller.
• 1964 - Voices From the Inaudible: The Patients Speak. New York: Farrar, Straus and Company.

External links

• Theodor Reik at Find a Grave

• A summary and critique of Reik's 1946 article on shofar can be found in Hearing Shofar: The Still Small Voice of the Ram's Horn, Volume Three [1]

Jewish Wit Gamut Press 1962

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