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The re-publication, after more than thirty years, of three of Theodor Reik's books in one volume gives us a welcome opportunity to renew our acquaintance with works which have become part of our habitual modes of thought, and to judge anew the lasting value of their contribution. These books first appeared in German; The Compulsion to Confess and Need for Punishment” in 1925; The Shock of Thought in 1928; The Unknown Murderer in 1932. Only the last of these has appeared before in English and it has been long out of print. They were conceived and written at the height of the excitement created by the new advances in ego psychology initiated by Freud's books of the early twenties, particularly Beyond the Pleasure Principle and The Ego and the Id. The concepts of the super-ego, guilt and the need for punishment, fertilized by Reik's rich clinical experience and relentless self-analysis, produced new insights of lasting importance. Reik was able to enrich both our knowledge of the dynamics of mental illness and of the development of social institutions. Characteristically for Reik these two kinds of insight are always interwoven.
For these books, like all he has written, bear the direct imprint of his thought processes and give us the experience of hearing him “muse out loud.” They have that special mixture of art and science, that delight in “surprise” and that notable sense for the dialectical simultaneity of opposites in the phenomena he studies that we have learned to expect of him.
A healthy corrective is found in these books to the current tendency to denigrate or ignore the central importance of the oedipus complex and “its heir, the super-ego,” both for the genesis of neurosis and for the development of normal character structures. Particularly in The Compulsion to Confess, the most important of the three works, to which the other two serve as enlargement on special points and development of further insights, do we find the fruitfulness of Freud's central concept,