Theodor Reik’s Listening with the Third Ear

and the role of self-analysis in

contemporary psychoanalytic thinking

Jeremy D. Safran

I first read Theodor Reik’s (1948) Listening with the Third Ear dur-
ing the early years of my clinical psychology training in graduate
school, long before I became an analyst, and many years before
topics such as intersubjectivity, countertransference, and the sub-
jectivity and internal processes of the analyst became fashionable
in psychoanalytic writing. In rereading Reik today, it is striking to
me what a profound impact his thinking had on my own develop-
ment as a therapist (e.g., Safran & Muran, 2000) as well as the
extent to which he anticipated major trends in contemporary psy-
choanalytic thinking.
One general line of contemporary thinking so clearly antici-
pated by Reik can be found in writing of theorists such Theodore
Jacobs (1991), Christopher Bollas (1987, 1992, 1999), Thomas
Ogden (1994, 2001, 2008), and the Italian analyst Antonino Ferro
(2002). While there are important differences in the work and
style of these authors, I group them together because they all em-
phasize the importance of ongoing reflection on their own asso-
ciations while they are working, in order to help understand the
patient, without necessarily disclosing their associations or coun-
tertransference reactions to their patients (Although both Jacobs
and Bollas do on some occasions).
A second group of theorists who represent another exten-
sion of Reik’s thinking consists of authors such as the late Ste-
phen Mitchell (1988, 1993; Mitchell & Aron, 1999), Darlene Eh-
renberg (1992), Lewis Aron (1996), Philip Bromberg (1998,
2006), Donnel Stern (1997, 2010), and Jody Davies (2004). All of
these authors can be loosely classified as identifying with the in-
Psychoanalytic Review, 98(2), April 2011 © 2011 N.P.A.P.
206 JEREMY D. SAFRAN

terpersonal/relational tradition. The reason I distinguish them

from the first group is because they tend to place more of an em-
phasis on the inevitability of the analyst’s ongoing participation in
enactments with patients. Enactments are conceptualized as re-
petitive scenarios played out in the relationship between patient
and analyst that are shaped by the intersection of each of their
unconscious contributions, personal histories, conflicts, and char-
acteristic ways of relating to others. This group of theorists also
emphasizes the importance of developing some understanding of
their own contributions to the enactment, and of possibly disclos-
ing their countertransference experience and explicitly acknowl-
edging their own contributions to the patient.
Paula Heimann’s (1950) paper on countertransference is of-
ten acknowledged as an important precursor to the contempo-
rary interest in countertransference and unconscious communi-
cation. And Wilfred Bion (1967, 1970), who spoke about the
importance of approaching each session without memory or de-
sire, is widely acknowledged as a seminal influence by many con-
temporary analysts, including Thomas Ogden, Christopher Bol-
las, and Antonino Ferro. It is impossible not to be struck by the
almost complete absence of any reference to Reik by major con-
temporary psychoanalytic theorists whose writing so clearly inhab-
its some of the soil so well tilled by Reik in the 1940s and early
1950s.
The virtual absence of reference to Reik in the contemporary
literature, given his remarkable prescience, is reminiscent in
some respects to the historical marginalization of Sandor Ferenc-
zi by the psychoanalytic mainstream—a marginalization that be-
gan to come to an end in the early 1990s, when Ferenczi’s clinical
diaries were finally published, and various psychoanalytic schools,
especially the American relational tradition, began to reclaim him
as an important ancestor (Aron & Harris, 1993). The reasons for
Ferenczi’s marginalization have been speculated on extensively
by many authors, especially Andre Haynal (1990). Although there
has been some discussion of the reasons for Reik’s marginaliza-
tion (e.g., Nobus, 2006), I do not think this topic has yet received
nearly the amount of attention it deserves. But this will not be the
topic of the current paper. Instead what I focus on is a brief re-
view of some of Reik’s major contributions to our understanding
THEODOR REIK’S LISTENING WITH THE THIRD EAR 207

of such themes as unconscious communication between patient

and analyst, the analyst’s use of his or her own associations as a
source of information, and the intersubjective nature of the ana-
lytic relationship. I also explore some of the ways in which these
themes have been further elaborated and extended by contempo-
rary analysts.
While Freud’s self-analysis is considered a cornerstone in
the development of psychoanalysis, his discussion of the analyst’s
reflection on his or her own internal experience as part of the
analytic process is relatively limited, and he clearly saw counter-
transference as an obstacle to analysis needing to be managed or
resolved rather than as a valuable source of information. Freud’s
(1912) introduced the topic of “evenly hovering attention” rela-
tively early on in his thinking.
According to Freud (1912) , the correct analytic attitude
consists in making no effort to concentrate the attention on any-
thing in particular, and maintaining in regard to all that one hears
the same measure of calm, quiet attentiveness—of “evenly-hover-
ing attention.” . . . As soon as attention is deliberately concentrat-
ed in a certain degree, one begins to select from the material be-
fore one; one point will be fixed in the mind with particular
clearness and some other consequently disregarded, and in this
selection one’s expectations or one’s inclinations will be followed.
This is just what must not be done. . . . If one’s expectations are
followed in this selection there is the danger of never finding any-
thing but what is already known, and if one follows one’s inclina-
tions anything which is to be perceived will most certainly be falsi-
fied. (pp. 111–112)
In this same paper, Freud began to discuss the topic of unconscious
communication between analyst and patient. According to Freud:
The analyst must bend his own unconscious like a receptive organ
toward the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust
himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the
transmitting microphone. Just as the receiver transmutes the elec-
trical oscillations induced by the sound waves back again into sound
waves, so is the physician’s unconscious mind able to reconstruct
the patient’s unconscious, which has determined his free associa-
tions. (pp. 115–116)
These were not, however themes that Freud continued to re-
fine over the course of his immensely prolific career. Reik (1948),
208 JEREMY D. SAFRAN

perhaps more than any other theorist, attempted to elaborate

Freud’s thinking on these topics in a comprehensive fashion. Fol-
lowing Freud, he argued for the importance of the analyst not al-
lowing his or her attention to become attached to any one aspect
of the observational field, since this limits the analyst’s ability to
perceive other potentially important data that are not the focus of
attention. Furthermore, Reik highlighted the importance of sus-
pending critical judgment in order to allow fleeting impressions
to emerge into awareness. Finally, he emphasized that it was criti-
cal for analysts to turn their attention inwards in order to attend
to relevant data emerging from their own unconscious.
Reik argued that many of the more subtle nuances of inter-
personal communication are expressed and perceived at uncon-
scious levels, and that only by looking inwards and listening with the
third ear (an expression he borrowed from Nietzsche) could the
analyst come to really understand his or her patients. Reik em-
phasized the importance of oscillating back and forth between an
internal focus and external focus. With respect to the internal fo-
cus, he provides a numerous illuminating clinical examples in
which he attends to vague impressions, intuitions, images, associa-
tions, and even melodies (e.g., Reik, 1948, 1953, 1956). With
respect to the external focus Reik (1948) emphasizes the im­
portance of subtle details in the patient’s manner and style of pre-
sentation. In his words:
We remember details of another person’s dress and peculiarities
in his gestures, without recalling them; a number of minor points,
an olfactory nuance; a sense of touch while shaking hands, too
slightly observed; warmth, clamminess, roughness or smoothness
of the skin; the manner in which he glances up or looks—of all this
we are not consciously aware, and yet it influences our opinion.
The minutest movements accompany every process of thought;
muscular twitches in face or hands and movements of the eyes
speak to us as well as words. (p. 135)

These details, according to Reik, are typically processed at an

unconscious level, and it is often only by turning our attention
inward that we are able to partially reconstruct what we have been
reacting to. In Reik’s (1948) words:
The first section begins in the clear daylight of consciousness. Let
us call to mind the analytic situation that presents itself to us daily.
THEODOR REIK’S LISTENING WITH THE THIRD EAR 209

The subject speaks or is silent, and accompanies his speech of si-

lence with “speaking” gestures. We see the play of his features, the
variety of his movements. All this communicates to us the vital ex-
pression of what he is feeling and thinking. It supplies that psychi-
cal data, which the analyst assimilates unconsciously. (p. 132)

This details of this process are never totally accessible the analyst.

Clinical examples

Throughout his writing Reik provides a variety of different types

of examples of ways in which he listens with the third ear that vary
with respect to style and emphasis. For example, while working
with a patient who is constantly complaining about her husband
(who happens to be a farmer), Reik (1953) becomes aware of the
song “three blind mice” running through his mind. He reflects
on the meaning of the lyrics: “She cut off their tails with a carving
knife” and speculates that there is an emasculating quality to his
patient. Or consider the following example: Reik (1956) intuits
that a young man who is worried that he is responsible for the
pregnancy of a married woman with whom he had a brief affair, is
unconsciously concerned that he is impotent. He then recon-
structs both the internal processes and external cues contributing
to his intuitions.
I will provide one more illustration of Reik’s approach, with a
more detailed example from Listening with the Third Ear (Reik,
1948). A young woman has a consultation session with Reik to
explore going into analysis with him. She tells him about various
problems in her life: marriage, social relations, and professional
life. She also informs Reik that she is consulting with him after
terminating with her previous analyst because things were not
working out. In general, Reik’s impression of her is that she is in-
telligent, sincere and friendly, and pleasant. Two days later the
woman calls to make another appointment. While speaking with
her on the phone, Reik does not recognize her name or that she
had promised to call. Reik then says to the reader: “Now I was
forced to follow the basic rule: Analyst analyze yourself!” (Reik,
1948, p. 312).
Reflecting back, Reik now remembers feeling slightly an-
noyed during their last session. “Why was I annoyed?”—he asks
210 JEREMY D. SAFRAN

himself. He remembers having had the impression in their first

meeting that the woman’s previous analyst had lost patience with
her, perhaps, he speculates, after she provoked him many times.
He then remembers two things the woman had said during the
session that, in his words, “had unconscious significance of which
I had not realized but had nevertheless sensed” (p. 313). He re-
members that at the end of the session she had asked Reik wheth-
er he was willing to take her on as a patient. He recalls that before
he could answer her, she had asked him whether he would advise
her to go to Dr. N.—another analyst who apparently she did not
know. In response Reik had suggested that she should go to Dr. N.
At the time, the question seemed reasonable enough to Reik, but
looking back he remembers the patient looking at him with a leer
and a kind of sidelong glance. Now as Reik reflects on the epi-
sode, he construes her actions in retrospect as a “provocation of a
malicious kind” (p. 313). And he thinks to himself : “You do not
ask a girl to dance and then wonder out loud whether you should
not rather dance with another girl” (p. 313).
Now Reik realizes that when he had suggested to her that she
should go to Dr. N, he had been responding in anger. In contem-
porary terms he realizes that he is already beginning to partici-
pate in an enactment. He thinks about her sidelong glance, and
then another memory comes to mind. He remembers that at one
point during the session the patient had casually mentioned read-
ing an unfavorable review of one of Reik’s books. “Why would she
ask this?” thinks Reik. “Considering her otherwise excellent man-
ners, there must have been an unconscious hostile or aggressive
tendency in her remark,” he infers.
This early insight is ultimately helpful to Reik in conceptual-
izing his patient as having an unconscious masochistic tendency
to provoke. It also helps Reik to work constructively with his irri-
table feelings, and to ultimately disembed from the enactment.
Noting the discrepancy between his own human reaction of being
annoyed and what was, at the time, the idealized image of the ana-
lyst as neutral and objective, Reik writes, “What kind of psychoan-
alyst, some readers will ask, can feel annoyed or impatient? Is this
the much praised calm and the correct scientific attitude of the
therapist? . . . The question is easily answered. The psychoanalyst
is a human being like any other and not a god . . . in fact he has to
THEODOR REIK’S LISTENING WITH THE THIRD EAR 211

be human. How else could he understand other human beings?”

(Reik, 1948, p. 315). Here Reik emphasizes the irreducible sub-
jectivity of the analyst in a way more common to contemporary
psychoanalytic writing, than it was during the heyday of American
psychoanalysis an in the 1940s and 1950s. By contemporary stan-
dards, many of Reik’s clinical examples, including this one, have a
somewhat dated or quaint feel to them. But it is important to rec-
ognize how radical they were for the times.
I close by providing two examples of well-known contempo-
rary analysts whose particular ways of making use of their own sub-
jectivity in the analytic relationship represent very different exten-
sions of Reik’s approach. The first is Thomas Ogden (1994, 2001,
2008) . Ogden is difficult to classify as belonging to any particular
analytic school, but he has been influenced extensively by theo-
rists such as Klein (1957, 1987), Winnicott (1958, 1965), and in-
creasingly by Bion (1967, 1970). In fact Ogden uses Bion’s term
“reverie” to refer to the analyst’s inner associations (Ogden, 1994).
Ogden (1994) introduces the concept of “the analytic third” to
account for the informational value of the analyst’s fleeting asso-
ciations, images, and fantasies. According to Ogden, the analytic
third is a third subject in the room that is constituted by the joint
contributions of patient and analyst. The analyst’s inner experi-
ence will inevitably be influenced by this analytic third and thus
will inevitably say something about both analyst and patient.
Ogden tends to reconstruct his own fleeting moment-by-
moment associations to the patient’s material. In many cases, these
associations initially seem meaningless or irrelevant to the clinical
issue at hand. For example, while listening to a patient talking he
finds his attention wandering to a letter sitting on his desk from a
colleague in Italy who has written to him about a matter that that
letter had said was delicate, and should be kept confidential (Og-
den, 1994). He then notices the postage markings on the enve-
lope and has the fleeting fantasy that it was part of a bulk mailing.
Ogden feels suspicious of the genuineness and intimacy of the let-
ter, and feels disappointed. His attention then returns to what his
patients is saying. In this manner, his attention drifts back and
forth between the patient and his own reverie, and towards the
end of the session he makes an interpretation that is guided by his
reflection of the possible meaning of the link between his own as-
212 JEREMY D. SAFRAN

sociations and that material that the patient is presenting. What I

want to emphasize about Ogden is that while for him the analytic
relationship is intrinsically intersubjective (or, to use the Barang-
ers’ term, constituted by a bipersonal field; Baranger & Baranger,
2009), there still seems be some level at which he sees himself as
able to in some sense step out of this field sufficiently to be able to
understand the patient’s contribution to it without understand-
ing how he may be influencing the patient.
As a point of contrast I want to briefly consider Philip Brom-
berg’s approach. Bromberg, who is typically identified with the
interpersonal/relational tradition, is one of the few contempo-
rary analysts who actually references Reik. For Bromberg (1998,
2006), dissociated aspects of the patient’s experience cannot be
verbalized. They can only be brought into the room in embodied
form. And the only way in which the analyst can come to know the
patient’s experience is through his or her participation in the in-
evitable and ongoing enactments of psychoanalysis. To quote
Bromberg (2006), “The road to the patient’s unconscious is cre-
ated . . . nonlinearly by the analyst’s own unconscious participa-
tion in its construction even while he thinks he is simply observing
it” (p. 86). Analysis is thus a messy process, full of struggle and
surprises.
Unlike Ogden, who reflects on the meaning of his own asso-
ciations and yet at some level seems to manage to stay above the
fray, Bromberg (2006) maintains that impasses, crises, and what
he terms “potholes on the royal road to the unconscious” are in-
evitable. These potholes take place when the patient’s dissociated
experience triggers a parallel state of dissociation in the analyst.
At these times, the analyst’s dissociation serves the function of
splitting off self-states that are experienced as intolerable or
shameful (e.g., self as sadistic, self as impotent, self in despair). In
order to work through the impasse the analyst is forced to con-
front and acknowledge these dissociated self-states to himself or
herself and possibly to the patient as well.
It is only when the analyst can, as Bromberg (2006) puts it,
“wake up” to the nature of his or her own participation in the en-
actment that things can begin to change. To quote Bromberg,
“The analyst is forced to deal with the patient’s experience as
THEODOR REIK’S LISTENING WITH THE THIRD EAR 213

something that gradually permeates its way into his soul despite
his theories and logic” (p. 93). From the patient’s perspective, until
this happens, the analyst just “doesn’t get it.” The patient is all
alone in his or her pain and despair and the analyst’s attempts to be
empathic are experienced as hollow. There are some similarities
here between Bromberg’s emphasis on the need for the analyst to
participate in the enactment in order to actually know the patient’s
dissociated experience at a felt level and the way in which analysts
influenced by Bion such as Ogden conceptualize projective identi-
fication as a form of unconscious communication. But there are
also important differences that I will not elaborate on here.
The writing of Theodore Jacobs, one of the first analysts to
introduce the concept of enactment to the literature, lies some-
where between the two different groups or styles I have been dis-
cussing. Jacobs (1991) provides compelling accounts of the way in
which the analyst can gain an empathic understanding of the pa-
tient’s inner struggles by engaging in a type of inner work through
which personal memories, emotions, and shifting self-states that
are evoked by the patient and that resonate with the patient’s in-
ner struggles are reflected on. There are similarities between the
styles of Jacob (1991) and Ogden (1994, 2001). Both pay exten-
sive attention to personal associations while the patient is speak-
ing, and attempt to make sense of the relevance of these associa-
tions to the patient. Ogden’s (1994, 2001, 2008) reverie often
tends to have a fleeting, moment-by-moment, associative, com-
mon, and everyday (to use his term “quotidian”) quality to them.
In contrast, Jacobs (1991) tends to focus on his own personal
memories (often from the distant past) and associated feelings
that may be in some way connected with the patient’s struggles.
There is a sense in which Jacob’s associations tend to be more self-
revealing than Ogden’s, a way in which he comes to know the pa-
tient through a form of self-analysis rather than through using his
associations to decode the patient’s unconscious.

Conclusion

I have briefly discussed the approaches of Thomas Ogden, Philip

Bromberg, and Theodore Jacobs as representatives of different
214 JEREMY D. SAFRAN

styles of contemporary psychoanalysis that were both anticipated

in the work of Theodor Reik. Ogden’s style of reflecting on his
own associations or reverie as a way of understanding the patient
is similar in some respects to the approaches of a number of other
contemporary analysts, including Christopher Bollas and An-
tonino Ferro. All are consistent with the thread of Reik’s work
that emphasizes the potential role of the analyst’s unconscious
processes in decoding the unconscious of the patient. Jacob’s em-
phasis is similar in some respects to Ogden’s and in other respects
to Bromberg’s.
Analysts such as Philip Bromberg, Donnel Stern, Lewis Aron,
and Jody Davies are all consistent with a thread of Reik’s work that
emphasizes the centrality of a form of self-analysis that involves
exploring and accepting one contribution to the analytic process.
This thread is in some respects less well developed in Reik’s think-
ing, but it is there. Reik (1948) consistently emphasizes the im-
portance of what he terms “inner truthfulness” and “moral cour-
age” (p. 500) in the analyst. He speaks explicitly about the
importance of ongoing self-analysis, and devotes more of his writ-
ing than virtually any other analyst I can think of to a type of con-
fessional self-analysis, which can be seen as an extremely impor-
tant extension of the type of self-analysis found in Freud’s (1900)
Interpretation of Dreams. Reik’s self-analysis, however, does not for
the most part take place in the context of his attempts to under-
stand what is being enacted between him and the patient.
There are undoubtedly many factors contributing to Reiks’s
marginalization by contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers. Some
of them are likely attributable to various political factors during
his lifetime. For example, Reik was a nonmedical analyst during a
period when American psychoanalysis was dominated by psychia-
try. No doubt the fact that Reik had a somewhat colloquial writing
style and a wide popular readership contributed to his marginal-
ization by mainstream psychoanalysis as well. In addition, Reik
was fascinated by the exploration of the unconscious at a time
when American psychoanalysis was dominated by ego psychology.
Finally, Reik’s emphasis on the bipersonal nature of the analytic
relationship (Baranger & Baranger, 2009) and his emphasis on
the use of the countertransference as an analytic instrument were
simply out of step with the dominant classical psychoanalytic cul-
THEODOR REIK’S LISTENING WITH THE THIRD EAR 215

ture of the times. Whether or not it is important for us to go back

and study Reik more carefully because there are veins in his work
that have not yet been mined as fully as they might be, or primar-
ily for historical reasons and to “set the record straight,” is not
entirely clear to me. But what is clear is that a comprehensive ex-
amination of Reik’s anticipation of and contributions to contem-
porary psychoanalytic thinking is long overdue.

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