Theodor Reik was born in Vienna where he studied medicine. It was during this time that he developed an interest in psychiatry. He met Sigmund Freud in 1910 who encouraged him. Reik went on to receive his training in analysis from Karl Abraham in Berlin. After World War I Theodor Reik worked as an analyst in Vienna and then in Berlin, until he moved to The Haag, Netherlands, in 1934.
His many publications cover a vide spectrum of subjects including clinical and anthropological themes, psychological theory and also many psychoanalytic articles on literary and musical figures, such as Flaubert and G. Mahler. Four of his best known papers of the 1920s were collected in Das Ritual, psychoanalitisches Studien (1928), Ritual Psychoanalytic Studies (1931). The studies ranged from primitive rituals and folkloristic customs to Jewish religious rituals and customs. His papers on problems of crime, including the compulsion to confess, and on Freud’s view of capital punishment were developed in Der unbekannte Moerder (1932) (The unknown Murderer, 1936). In these papers Reik sets forth as a major concept that unconscious guilt motivates the crime itself and also the criminal’s need to be caught and punished. Reik believed that analysts’ theoretical assumptions may interfere with treatment and that the therapeutic relationship should be an “unconscious duet” between patient and analyst, in which surprises to both parties provide important insights. He explained his new technique in Der Ueberraschte Psychologe (1935) (Surprise and the Psychoanalyst, 1936) and Listening with the Third Ear (1948). In Aus Leiden Freuden (1940), Masochism in Modern Man (1941) Reik stated his theory that masochistic suffering is a search for pleasure. He therefore regarded masochism and the associated death instinct as secondary rather than primary as seen by Freud.
Among his more than 50 books are the autobiographical From Thirty Years with Freud (1940), Fragment of a Great Confession (1949), and The Search Within (1956). His biblical tetralogy included The Creation of Woman (1960), and in 1962 he published Jewish Wit. In Pagan Rites in Judaism he endeavors to show that much of the pagan and prehistoric survives in the rites of Judaism as professed today.
In 1938 Reik immigrated to the US. In 1946 he was elected president of the National Association for Psychoanalytic Psychology. He was the founder of the Theodor Reik Clinical Center for Psychotherapy. He died in New York in 1970.