You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
How shall we speak of Theodor Reik's days and ways?
Even in his own family Dr. Reik's place was a chronologically anomalous one. When he was born on May 12, 1888, his parents had two adolescent sons, Hugo aged 15, and Otto aged 14. Two years after Reik's birth, his sister Margaret arrived. When he was eighteen Reik lost his father, and four years later his mother died. In this same year, 1910, he met Sigmund Freud, and for the remainder of his life he lived for the meaning that Freud and psychoanalysis were to give to his existence.
In the earliest years of the life of psychoanalysis there were a number of gifted men to whom Freud brought light and meaning and a way of life. In the main these were Viennese physicians of Jewish extraction who were agnostic. They were intellectual men, searchers for truth, who were dissatisfied with the traditional ways of treating mental patients. To such men Freud offered not only a new and revolutionary way of psychotherapy but also a magical door to the understanding of man and his culture. Above all, Freud was a truly heroic figure, a person so far above the ordinary that even highly gifted men could acknowledge his superiority and forgo any competitive encounter. Freud provided a proud image in whom the earliest psychoanalysts could find strength and identity.
From the beginning, certain men who were not physicians were also attracted, and in fact invited by Freud, to psychoanalysis, and they became an intrinsic part of its development. Freud had immediately recognized that his discoveries applied to many different aspects of man's development and not merely to the therapy of