Remembering Theodor Reik And The Third Ear

The writings of Sigmund Freud introduced me to psychoanalysis. The works of Theodor Reik helped me to become an analyst. Freud gave me insight into a new world. Reik gave me courage to enter this world. Freud showed me how to think analytically and to understand the unconscious. Reik showed me how to trust intuition.

My German period, during which both Reik and I lived in Berlin, ended in near catastrophe. While I remained in Germany until 1936, Theodor Reik had left earlier and almost immediately after his departure published the German original edition of his Surprise and the Analyst. He sent a copy to me and I reviewed it for the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. The editor liked my high praise for this work of a Jewish analyst living abroad and published my review on the first page—even in the early days of Fascism an unusual thing to do. It was promptly recognized as a provocation by the authorities, but I survived the threat of retaliation; I do now remember how. Perhaps Nazi terror at that time was not yet as well organized and as efficient as it was one year later. It was a clear warning for me, I heard it and escaped a few weeks later (in the fall of 1936).

When I read Theodor Reik's book, Listening With The Third Ear: The Inner Experience of a Psychoanalyst, my first impression was that of an immediate contact with the author. The book is eminently autobiographical; and in many places intimate experiences are related, as the subtitle implies. Thirty-seven years of analytic experience were utilized; the author explained the therapeutic process to his readers as consisting of both unconscious and conscious communication between the analyst and his patients.

The aim of the book was justification of intuitive psychological understanding. It contains a description of the unconscious process of such understanding in analysis and in the analyst. Intuition was defined