Theodor Reik

Background

Theodor Reik was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of Max Reik, a civil servant, and Caroline Trebitsch. His family lived in genteel semipoverty. Reik's father died in 1906.

Education

In 1906 Reik entered the University of Vienna to study literature and psychology.

Career

Reik supported himself throughout his years at the university by tutoring and doing odd jobs.

In 1910 Reik met Sigmund Freud and began a professional and personal relationship that survived Reik's later theoretical deviations from Freud's teachings. Reik became Freud's pupil and protégé.

Freud contributed to Reik's financial support, advised against a medical degree in favor of research and writing, and arranged for Reik's analysis with Karl Abraham, who waived his fee. Reik earned his Ph. D. in psychology in 1912. His doctoral thesis, a psychoanalytic study of Gustave Flaubert's Temptation of St. Anthony, was the first dissertation in the field of psychoanalysis to be accepted by the university.

In 1915 Freud presented Reik with the First International Prize for his essay in applied psychoanalysis, "The Puberty Ritual of Primitives. " Reik served in the German army for three years during World War I. In 1919 he published his first book, Das Werk Richard Beer-Hofmanns. From 1918 to 1928 he lived and practiced in Vienna, and was a participant in Freud's famous pedagogical Wednesday evenings.

In 1928 Reik moved to Berlin, where he taught at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1933, with the growth of Nazi power, he fled to The Hague.

Reik arrived in New York City penniless, with a pregnant wife and two children, but with twenty-five years of experience in psychoanalysis and fifteen books to his credit.

He was disappointed by his reception in the psychoanalytic community and embittered by the refusal of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute to grant him full membership because he lacked an M. D. Nevertheless, he soon established a thriving private practice, and he set up a clinic for people who could not afford the high fees of most psychoanalysts.

In 1946 he established the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, an organization that accepted both physicians and nonphysicians. Reik was naturalized as an American citizen in 1944.

He died in New York City.

Achievements

• He wrote fifty books and innumerable articles on myth, ritual, religion, crime and punishment, love, sex, and the problems of psychoanalytic practice. His writings about Freud often focused on his own experiences with the founder of psychoanalysis. Several major themes stand out in Reik's work. In Listening with the Third Ear (1948), his fullest exploration of the practice of psychoanalysis, he discussed the crucial importance of intuition in psychoanalysis and the unconscious "duet" of patient and therapist, with "surprises" arising from this underground communication leading to therapeutic progress. Reik perhaps was not in the first rank of creative practitioners and theorists, but he was a stimulating and provocative writer and personality who permitted himself to wonder and speculate freely in a substantial body of work. His contribution was as much in his sanction of divergence and free thinking in psychoanalytic theory as in the specific content of his ideas.

Works

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  • A Psychologist Looks at Love

    (Theodor Reik (12 May 1888 in Wien — 31 December 1969 in N...)

  • The search within;: The inner experiences of a psychoanalyst; from the works of Theodor Reik

    (5 7/8"x8 5/8" 657 page hardcover published by Farrar, Sta...)

  • Mystery On The Mountain The Drama Of The Sinai Revelation

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Myth and Guilt: The Crime and Punishment of Mankind (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Myth and Guilt: The Crime and Punishment of ...)

  • Masochism In Modern Man

    (A psychological treatise on mankind's attitudes towards p...)

  • The Secret Self: Psychoanalytic Experiences in Life and Literature

    (Theodor Reik (1888 - 1969) was one of Freud's first stude...)

  • The Creation Of Woman: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry Into The Myth Of Eve

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • Psychology Of Sex Relations

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • Of Love & Lust: On the Psychoanalysis of Romantic and Sexual Emotions

    (Exterior: Very Good; Interior: Fine; Dust Jacket: None. 1957)

  • Surprise And The Psycho-Analyst: On the Conjecture and Comprehension of Unconscious Processes (International Library of Psychology)

    (First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylo...)

  • Ritual Psycho-Analytic Studies

    (Reik, Theodor)

Views

He believed that therapists should rely primarily on their own unconscious in their responses to their patients, and that theoretical assumptions often only stood in the way. In what he considered his most significant work, Masochism in Modern Man (1941), Reik analyzed the role of masochism in human relations. He saw the masochist as "a pleasure seeker" willing to endure pain and humiliation in order to be loved. Reik disagreed with some orthodox Freudian emphases and criticized what he called the "grotesquely sexual" nature of the psychoanalytic view of human nature. Reik denied both the theory that all neuroses had a sexual base and the idea of the sublimation of sex. He believed that neurosis was primarily due to a weakness of ego and the resultant inability to handle inner conflict.

Personality

Reik was a cultivated man with a wide range of interests. He was a prolific and vivid writer who frequently drew on his own experiences as well as those of his patients. His work was liberally sprinkled with references to history, literature, and music. He was an exploratory thinker who questioned established psychoanalytic ideas and suggested innovations in theory and practice. Yet he apparently did not arouse the hostility of his colleagues. His style was lively, colloquial, and anecdotal.

Connections

In 1914 Reik married a woman who is referred to as "Ellie O" in his autobiographical writings; they had one child.

In 1933 his wife died. He then married Marija Cubelik; they had two children. The family immigrated to the United States in 1938.

Father:

Max Reik

Mother:

Caroline Trebitsch

Spouse:

Marija Cubelik