The Paradox Of Theodor Reik*

Theodor Reik was, perhaps beyond all else, a paradoxical man, and here I would like to dwell upon some of these paradoxes. Reik was a subtle person who responded to the finest nuances of communication. This is evident to anyone who has read his books. He had an original spirit of observation and noticed details that escaped the attention of almost everyone else. At the same time, however, Reik did not observe or respond to events that would practically hit other people right in the face.

There is, for example, a case Reik reports in Listening With the Third Ear which indicates that he was facing an extremely provocative patient who would easily enrage a beginning analyst and impress most analysts as oppressive and trying. This patient reported to Reik that she had read an unfavorable review of one of his books in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly and also asked him whether she should consult another analyst even though she had already broken off with her prior analyst in order to see Reik. Reik then reports that through noticing a passing expression on the patient's face and later analyzing his own resistances he concluded that the patient must be a masochistic person with unconscious hostility.

Actually, this patient's hostility, although unconscious to her, was right on the surface and would have been readily recognized by many lay people who were not psychoanalysts. The paradox is this: Reik, despite his sensitivity to subtle nuances of feeling, was a remote person who was not all that affected by the hostility of others. He had contended with hostility most of his life and had grown quite inured to it. It was this very quality of remoteness and detachment that enabled