Annie Reich (1902–1971)

On 5 January 1971 Dr Annie Reich-Rubinstein passed away after eight and a half years of severe illness, followed by one year of such unbelievable suffering that her death finally came as a relief.

All of Dr Reich's colleagues and friends knew that she was a very charming woman, an outstanding psychoanalyst, an excellent clinician and teacher, and a creative scientific writer. But few colleagues know much about her past. For this reason, a few words on Annie Reich's

background, her training, and her development as a psychoanalyst and as a human being are appropriate.

She was born in Vienna on 9 April 1902 as the daughter of a well-to-do businessman. Her mother had been a teacher. I knew her father only superficially, but well enough to see that father and daughter had the same kind of charm and of widely spread intellectual interests.

Unfortunately, Annie Reich belonged to the generation on whose adolescence the first world war had thrown a gloomy shadow. She had two brothers. The youngest, who is also a very successful businessman and a very competent sportsman, lives in Australia. She loved him dearly, but she was even more profoundly attached to her older brother who seems to have been a very serious intellectual. He was her model. When the war started he had to join the army and was killed. This was a terrible blow for her, but an intolerable one for her mother, who went into a severe depression. At the end of the war, the mother fell sick and died of the severe influenza that killed so many of our relatives and friends. Annie's father, who was also in the army, was away on a business trip; so she was alone at home with her dying mother. There she was, 16 years old, having lost both her mother and her beloved brother. Her father remarried after a year, but Annie was unable to develop a mutual relationship with her stepmother. At that time she joined the Aus