Listening with the Third Ear: The Inner Experience of a Psychoanalyst

by Theodor Reik

Case histories are used to show that a psychoanalyst's ability to understand and relate to his patients reflects his skills of self-observation and self-analysis

Genres: Psychology, Psychoanalysis

534 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1948

About the author

Lay analyst Theodor Reik was born on 5/12/1888, in Vienna, & died on 12/31/69, in New York. He was the 3rd child of four born to the cultured, lower-middle-class Jewish family of Max & Caroline Reik. Reik's father was a low-salaried government clerk who died when Theodor was 18. Freud became a father figure for the rest of his life. He attended public schools in Vienna & entered the University of Vienna, aged 18, where he studied psychology, French & German literature. He received a PhD in 1912, writing the 1st psychoanalytic dissertation, on Flaubert's The Temptation of St Anthony. He met Freud in 1910, and two years later became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. In 1914-15 he was in analysis with Karl Abraham in Berlin &, with the outbreak of WWI, served as an officer in the Austrian cavalry from 1915 to '18, seeing combat in Montenegro & Italy & being decorated for bravery. Following the resignation of Otto Rank, Reik became the Secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. For a decade he practiced in Vienna & began to write so extensively that Freud asked him: "Why do you piss around so much? Just piss in one spot" (Natterson, '66). Freud wrote "The Question of Lay Analysis" in defense of Reik, who'd been prosecuted under the quackery laws of Austria for practicing medicine. Reik moved to Berlin, where he lived & practiced from 1928 'til 1934 & again was a celebrated teacher at the psychoanalytic institute. Fearing the rise of the Nazis, he left for The Hague, where he continued practicing & teaching. During this time his 1st wife Ella, mother of his son Arthur, died. He married Marija. Two children were born of this, Theodora & Miriam. Still fearful of the Nazis, he moved to NYC where, as a non-medical analyst, he was denied full membership in the Psychoanalytic Society. Reik wouldn't accept the position of research analyst, altho he could have made a "charade" of agreement & practiced, as many did. Reik experienced financial difficulties for many periods. He was treated gratis by both Karl Abraham & Freud & for a time he received financial support of 200 marks a month from Freud. After he wrote for help in 1938, Freud wrote back: "What ill wind has blown you, just you, to America? You must have known how amiably lay analysts would be received there by our colleagues for whom psychoanalysis is nothing more that one of the handmaidens of psychiatry" (Hale, '95). Reik persevered, however, building a practice, & soon a group of colleagues centered around him &, in 1948, the Nat'l Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis was founded. Reik's influence on the development of nonmedical analysis in the USA was great. Not only did his many books have a profound effect on the general reading public but his influence through the NPAP (Nat'l Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis) & the institutes that split from it suggest that Reik was the major promulgator of non-medical analysis in the USA. Reik's psychoanalytic studies include discussions of such writers as Beer-Hofmann, Flaubert & Schnitzler as well as Shakespeare, Goethe & Gustav Mahler, to name but a few. He had a unique way of communicating & his writing & conversational style was free associational. His autobiography is to be found in his many works. Among his better known are: Listening with the Third Ear ('48); the monumental Masochism in Modern Man ('49); Surprise & the Psychoanalyst ('35); his recollection of Freud, From Thirty Years with Freud ('40); an autobiographical study, Fragment of a Great Confession ('49); applied psychoanalysis of the Bible in Mystery on the Mountain ('58); anthropology in Ritual ('58); & sexuality in Of Love and Lust ('59), Creation of Woman ('60), & The Psychology of Sex Relations ('61); & music in The Haunting Melody ('60). Toward the end of his life Reik, who grew a beard, resembled the older Freud & lived modestly, surrounded by photos of Freud from childhood to old age.

Reviews

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book written in the 1940's and is practically a textbook on listening to patients from a pyschiatrist's point of view. The job requires creativity, imagination, compassion, empathy and according to the author, some personal experiences and thoughts that match their patients ideas. The book is a case study of situations and problems with working with people and coming to understand their personal psychological issues. The book is well-written and very interesting to someone interested in how our minds work and in what it would take to be a good psychiatrist.

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely breathtaking. A cherished friend shared this with me and it was well worth it. Will revisit many times.

[Will Daly · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a long—very long… my version is over five hundred pages—argument for the value of intuition in psychoanalysis and the general importance of personal experience in addition to (i.e: not instead of) intellectual knowledge.

This is the meaning of the book's title. Rather than imposing your pre-baked judgments on what you're hearing, one ought to listen dispassionately without, at first, involving the action of your conscious mind: what Freud called "evenly-suspended attention."

It's a good point, but I think that Reik takes too long to make it. It's not that the book is light on content. Rather, the content that does exist is simply too diffuse—detours into free association, empathy, the nature of identity, along with various case studies and analyses of literature to demonstrate each theme. Along with this, Reik's main points (mentioned above), which seem to me quite reasonable and valuable, are over-argued, as if the author were somehow insecure about their validity.

Granted, the book comes from such an alien cultural context that it's entirely possible that Reik was arguing against points of view that were once worth fighting against, but have since evaporated.

It reminds me of how in the early chapters of the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud seems to devote hundreds of pages to examining and refuting various dream theories of his contemporaries, all of which have since been lost to history. At least in English, many of the books or authors that Freud references only appear in Google Searches in connection to the book itself, mummified by their inclusion in his monolithic work like the servants of some ancient Egyptian Pharaoh.

As an example of the climate that the book was written in, in a chapter where Reik attempts to criticize an early example of psychobabble, he quotes an analysis of a play by someone who appears to be an Adlerian, and it's truly crazy, even by today's standards of meaningless theory jargon. In essence, the author blames the criminal's behavior (in the play) on glandular deficiencies, and resorts to associating certain colors with certain dispositions and wishes, in an almost medieval manner [i.e: the idea that the four humors were somehow innately linked to certain colors].

Reik also criticizes an over-reliance on mythical terminology in the psychoanalysts of his day. Basically, the point that language ought to be used primarily for communication (and not for posturing or to disguise intellectual emptiness) is quite well-taken, but as with other points in the book, he belabors the hell out of it.

There are intriguing case studies throughout the book, but these fail to help Reik make his point succinctly. Chapters seem to pile after one another at random, and the general scheme of things is fairly hard to discern.

He also devotes some space to discussing therapeutic empathy, albeit in of a manner I found perplexing. Beyond mere identification, seeing yourself as someone else, he argues that you temporarily become the other person, at least on the level of psychic reality.

Yet I had thought that that was what identification means.

Although this point is rather obscure, I think it's valuable. If we try to tidy up what he's saying, the idea that the soul is essentially protean and realizes its faculty of empathy by temporarily changing into the person for whom its trying to feel things is quite strange and beautiful.

Contra Rene Girard, I think the more truthful view of things is that the soul does not primarily proceed by imitation, but by identification. We don't copy the things around us, we really believe that we are them. All that we know, as Reik writes somewhere (echoing Freud), we only know through identification, as the ego is, in a real sense, the first object of knowledge.

Throughout, in connection to his emphasis on personal experience over prejudice, Reik touches on a few cases where the truth is something subtly distinct from the knee-jerk psychoanalytic interpretation of things might hold.

Connected to all this is the element of surprise.

Just as analysis can't get to the truth without open-mindedness, so too does open-mindedness necessarily generate surprise.

Again, Reik does not argue against conscious comprehension, he only holds that it ought to operate on and after one's own unconscious has been stirred by close but impartial attention to the free-associations of another.

Just writing this review took an unusually long time, as I had to pore through my notes, which were very long, as Reik both seems to jump around at random, saying very many wise things about many subjects—yet at the same time, he seems to fail to make many strong, substantial points. Or rather, as I said, he does make good points, but he takes too long to make them.

I'm ambivalent about rating this book too badly. I'd say it's worth re-reading, which is pretty rare for a book.

But it's worth reading just to breathe the atmosphere of genius—as everyone seems to have to been in the "heroic age" of the earliest psychoanalysts (whatever you want to think of them as scientists).

That said, it's not worth reading to get very many big ideas. The book is mainly devoted to expounding one big idea, which, stated plainly, seems eminently reasonable, not worth five hundred pages of defense.

I might snidely note here that Reik was one of the first prominent lay-analysts, and that, in connection to this, he was famously sued by a patient, who had at first taken him to be "real" doctor. Maybe the book's length is a reflection of this?

It's not even unenjoyable reading, unless you are trying to derive a structure from it. Then you will take too many notes, and end up with a headache trying to make sense of it all.

So: with great and small ambivalence, I grant this three stars. Good, but too long.

[The] mome has spoken, the debate is over.

[Kathe · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book made me want to become a psychologist.

[Justin]

Not concise enough for me

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

A seminal book in my training to be a better therapist and person. (still working at it !)

[Naseeb Malik]

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