Theodor Reik and Ego Psychology

The interpretation of dreams and of free associations was among the earliest principal techniques of psychoanalytic research. Yet, while the conceptual and clinical aspects of free association have since received considerable attention, its meta-psychology has during that same time been comparatively neglected.

This paper will advance several metapsychological propositions concerning free association, on the basis of Theodor Reik's numerous contributions to the subject. The well-known controversies surrounding these contributions by Reik will be clarified, and hopefully reduced in intensity, in connection with Ernst Kris's ego-psychological approach to the same subject. Although Reik and Kris employ different modalities—Reik the intuitive, Kris the experimental—it is nevertheless possible to establish a strong commonality between them.

There is a large literature on the development and current status of the free-association idea. Bellak (2), for example, has produced a rather definitive study of its history, in which he traces the idea from Aristotle, through Locke, Hume, and Spencer, into the Wundt school and finally to Freud. Jones (12) has provided the biographical context of Freud's clinical and theoretical efforts during the early 1890's. These efforts led within that same decade to Studies on Hysteria, in which the free association method attains an explicit technical conceptualization, notably in the case of Elisabeth von R. The first topographic description appeared, at the turn of the century, in The Interpretation of Dreams, while its structural aspects were later investigated by Anna Freud (5). She emphasized the ego's plight in its efforts to cope with the “fundamental rule” on how the ego registers id and superego derivatives, and the analyst's point of view with regard to this ego activity. Eissler's famous paper (3) on parameters pinned down the variables that one encounters in the enformement of the fundamental rule, especially in connection with the a