Listening with a Third Ear, A Second Heart, and a Sixth Sense: Standing on the Shoulders of Theodor Reik

As to what I mean by “the third ear”: It is for me a kind of instrument of perception for the unconscious and especially for the repressed.”

The year of the publication of Listening with the Third Ear, 1948, coincided with the formal founding of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP). What a formidable time this must have been for a man who had certainly had his share of adversity. It appears at the apex of a life and career characterized by controversy, steadfastness, and reconstitution, again and again. Despite many displacements and tribulations Reik acquired what few analysts achieve anywhere, anytime: a popular readership and a name. I feel a strong kinship with the fervent stance of this early analyst in his defense of his ideas, and I have become cognizant to what degree I, in particular, am a beneficiary of his legacies.

Of the many works written by Reik from 1914 on, Listening with the Third Ear combines a private compulsion to reveal himself with a public passion for his profession. By his intricate melding of these two formidable drives into an exhaustive, descriptive exposition of the psychoanalyst's instrument, we are presented with a singular masterpiece. Of its time, no doubt, gilded with the rhetoric and verbosity of another era; weighted by detailed anecdote and meandering association; without an adequate vocabulary (and this is still true today) to define or pinpoint all that he knows about “listening” with an ear that, he emphasizes, is not given to all—yet a masterpiece, nonetheless. Anyone who holds us in his