On the Effect of Unconscious Death Wishes*

In Fragment of a Great Confession Reik refers at some length to the following article, “On the Effect of Unconscious Death Wishes,” translated here for the first time. He indicates how the article had explored certain obsessions and compulsions that had assailed him in 1913, the time the article was written. Reik uses the concept of unconscious death wishes to explain these symptoms, and the article thus marks the very beginning of his lifelong preoccupation with death wishes in their various guises. The piece has considerable biographical relevance in amplifying the information provided by Reik in Fragment and also is illustrative of psychoanalytic writing in its early moments.

Reik, at the age of twenty-five, had already published more than twenty articles in applied psychoanalysis, but this essay was his first clinical piece. At the time “Unconscious Death Wishes” was written, Reik had not yet formally begun psychoanalytic practice. He had been with the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society since November 15, 1911, when he presented “On Death and Sexuality” and was unanimously voted in as a member. The “patients” he describes below are frankly introduced as friends and acquaintances, and it is likely that he himself is one of the individuals analyzed in the latter portion of