Theodor Reik: architect of the subjective approach to psychoanalytic treatment

An overview of the life and work of Theodor Reik is presented. Because of the confluence of various personal qualities and circumstantial factors, Reik's contributions to twentieth-century psychoanalysis were significant, varied, and controversial. His major contributions include the following: (1) He demonstrated the critical importance of unconscious guilt and masochism in human affairs, on an individual basis as well as man's social institutions. In effect, all neuroses have underlying unconscious guilt and punishment issues. (2) He emphasized that the mission of the analyst is to create an intimate clinical relationship with the patient by utilizing his or her (the analyst's) unconscious in concert with the unconscious of the patient. (3) In establishing the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis in 1948, Reik became the father of nonmedical psychoanalytic training in America. (4) Over a thirty-year period after his arrival in New York City in 1938, Reik published over twenty books on psychoanalysis, Reikian style. The most read and influential was Listening With the Third Ear (1948). As a result, Reik became America's primary educator of psychoanalysis.