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When a psychoanalytic author takes a bite out of Freud it is no longer news; but when he takes his piece to the marketplace to chew in the noonday sun it is sometimes a nuisance. A reviewer has to be sent out to bite the author and this is at best an unpleasant task, especially when the author happens to be a person of Theodor Reik's achievements.
But in this book Reik really sticks his neck out. Tackling a topic which in one form or another has been one of the main subjects of exploration for two generations of his colleagues, he feels that the reader is entitled to a prefatory explanation. This he supplies without a trace of false modesty when he opens with the announcement that he is about to bring before the public a discovery that has thus far eluded all other psychologists and psychoanalysts including Freud, his great master whom he deeply reveres but with whom he must courageously disagree. Freud particularly, it turns out, was curiously blind to the truth when he confused love with sex. What Reik is going to demonstrate is that the two have little to do with each other.
The author's thesis, to which he arrives after a somewhat wearing series of introductory drum rolls and flourishes, runs something like this: our first love object is neither ourselves nor anyone else: it is our imaginary idea of what we would like to be, our ego ideal. This ideal derives from our notion of what our parents (who are not yet love objects but whose love, paradoxically, we are eager to retain) would like us to be. Our next love object is a person embodying this ideal whom we first admire and envy,