Masochism in Modern Man

By Theodor Reik. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., 1941. 439 pp.

AUS LEIDEN FREUDEN. By Theodor Reik. London: Imago Publishing Company, Ltd., 1940. 404 pp.

The first of these books is not a mere translation of the German original but has been considerably enlarged by the author. The following review is concerned chiefly with the English version although the study of the original has been helpful towards a fuller understanding of the author's opinions and intentions.

Reik's book deserves the fullest attention of every psychoanalyst because it is—to this reviewer's knowledge, and leaving the problem of homosexuality aside—the first full and exhaustive study of a perversion from the psychoanalytic point of view. It treats masochism as a nosological entity on the basis of a rich and penetrating experience. It discusses its diverse forms, its unconscious sources and its genesis, the differentiation from other forms of perversion, the relation to moral—or as Reik calls it—'social' masochism and its transformation into some important social phenomena. All this would be valuable enough if done on a merely eclectic basis by collecting, coördinating, and clarifying what Freud, his followers and his critics among the psychoanalysts have said on the subject. But Reik's book is far from being eclectic. Although he builds throughout on the basis of Freud's libido theory, his work shows the highest form of originality—at least the highest form desirable in scientific thinking—the originality of observation.

Every analyst has now and then had the experience, first described by Freud, that an analysand, after the last resistance against a correct interpretation had been removed, remarked with some astonishment, 'But this I have known all the time', although he has hitherto given ample proof that he had no conscious possession of this knowledge. The first reaction of scientists, and especially of psychoanalysts, on learning of a new, correct and convincing discovery, mad