My Thanks to Theodor Reik

The writings of Sigmund Freud introduced me to psychoanalysis. The works of Theodor Reik showed me how to be an analyst. Freud gave me knowledge, Reik gave me courage. One set goals, the other helped on the way to them. Freud showed how to think and to understand the unconscious, and Reik showed how to trust intuition and how to continue the search. After that start, experience with patients will do the rest.

My German period, studying Reik, ended in a near catastrophe. While I still remained in Germany (until 1936 in Berlin), Theodor Reik had already left and published almost immediately after his departure the German original edition of his Surprise and the Analyst. A copy was sent to me and I reviewed it for the “Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung.” The editor of the newspaper liked my high praise for this work of a Jewish analyst living abroad and published my review on the front page. This was promptly realized as a provocation by the authorities, but I survived the threat of disaster since the Nazi terror at that time was not yet well organized and as efficient as it was one year later. It was a clear warning, and I heard it.

When I came to the United States I read Theodor Reik's book Listening with the Third Ear, the Inner Experience of a Psychoanalyst. The first impression was that of an immediate and personal contact with the author. The book is eminently autobiographical; and in many places intimate subjective experiences are related, as the subtitle implies. Thirty-seven years of analytic experience were utilized; the therapeutic process was almost reduced to a direct unconscious and conscious communication between the author and his patients and between the author and his readers.

The aim of the book was an appeal for intuitive human psychological understanding and a description of the unconscious process of such understanding in analysis and in the analyst. Intuitive understanding was contrasted with scientific technical understanding and both were shown in their