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Over the course of a long career, Theodor Reik wrote hundreds of articles and more than thirty books. Listening with the Third Ear, finished in 1947 and published the following year, was perhaps the most influential. It brought an enlightened view of psychoanalysis to a popular audience (and to future analysts) and was widely read. Personal, anecdotal, and at ease with a variety of experiences, Reik spoke to the student of psychoanalysis, as well as to the general reader, and emphasized how productive the discovery of unconscious experience could be. As in his earlier books, he elaborated many now canonical tenets of psychoanalytic training, particularly those that concern the active inclusion of the analyst's own unconsciously driven associative process. Current psychoanalytic literature echoes his reminders that listening operates beyond theory. Although the issues of hegemony central to the quarrels that engaged Reik are not those that preoccupy the field today, the basic questions he raised about the development of a psychoanalyst have not lost their importance. Yet, apart from historical contexts, Reik is not often studied, the significance of his work and career is not always acknowledged, and Listening with the Third Ear is not frequently read.
Reik came of age amid the intellectual and cultural liveliness of Vienna in the first decades of the last century. His association with Freud began in 1910, and continued to dominate Reik's identity throughout his life. Freud sent him (with funds) to Abraham in Berlin for his analysis and training; in Vienna, he became an active member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and was among the first to teach there. He investigated literature, music, religion, and anthropology while doing his doctoral work in psychology. In 1912 the University of Vienna awarded him the first doctorate based on a psychoanalytic study. When Reik began publishing on applied and theoretical psychoanalytic subjects, his erudition and his contribu