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At the age of eighty Dr. Theodor Reik can look back on a psychoanalytic career that is almost unique. Among the psychoanalytic pioneers, Reik still stands as a giant who has illuminated whole areas that otherwise would remain in shadow.
Theodor Reik has come to symbolize the ability and the right of the psychoanalyst to exist and to create as a unique individual, and this fact is perhaps as significant as the magnitude of his psychoanalytic contributions as such. His continual reiteration of the need of the psychoanalyst to listen to his own unconscious has come to stand for a human discipline and path of discovery even more than a methodology in analytic technique.
Whereas the large crowd of psychoanalysts somehow became organized into followers and codifiers of a kind of dogma, Reik has been continually productive in a way which is distinctively his own. Although it is undoubtedly true that Reik's standing apart from the psychoanalytic academy developed from his own emotional needs and conflicts rather than intellectual convictions, this fact itself has many meanings which transcend Reik's own creative career. Reik has constantly struggled against ideational conformity, and against the abstractionist conservatism that befell Freud's monumental insights when psychoanalysis became a status profession. By design, by determination, and by destiny Reik has always been an anti-status person. And today we have the image of Theodor Reik standing