Upcoming Events at NPAP

 

 
NEW YORK — On June 2, 2013, the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP) will host a celebration of the 125th birthday of its founder, Theodor Reik.
 
An intimate in the original circle of students and early analysts that trained with Sigmund Freud, Reik was one of the most influential figures in the history of American psychoanalysis, and founder of the oldest and one of the largest non-medical psychoanalytic training institutes in the United States.
 
The event will also mark the 65th anniversary of NPAP, founded by Reik in 1948 as the first non-medical training institute in the country, one which has trained scores of influential analysts, and inspired the foundation of dozens of other non-medical institutes.
 
Members of Reik’s family will be there to reminisce. Digitized photographs and documents pertaining to the early history of psychoanalysis in America will be on display. Also present at the event will be the distinguished analyst, Professor Martin Bergmann, clinical professor of psychology at New York University where he teaches the course on the history of psychoanalysis.
 
A distinguished panel of members will discuss Reik’s legacy and contributions, including Murray H. Sherman, Charlotte Kahn, Alan J. Barnett, and Gerald J. Gargiulo. That panel will be moderated by Morton Israel.
 
“Reik came to Freud as a young man, and Freud was so impressed with his intellect and his extraordinary, natural capacity to explore the unconscious that Freud said: ‘One day, he could be one of our best hopes,’” Israel said. “And it was true. He became a surrogate son of Freud, and Freud supported him until the end of [Freud’s] life.”
 
“Reik was extraordinarily courageous,” Israel continued, noting that Reik fled the Nazis, came to the United States, and immediately produced influential books that caught the public imagination, despite being shunned by the medical establishment. “He was the man who educated the American public, and brought them this new understanding of human behavior. He was a complex man, whose confessional style and honesty is much more in tune with the 21st century than with his own century.”
 
Reik was born in Vienna in 1888 and entered the University of Vienna at 18 where he studied French literature and psychology, receiving his PhD in 1912 for his dissertation Flaubert and the Temptation of Saint Anthony, the first doctoral dissertation that used psychoanalysis as an interpretative framework. He met Freud in 1910, became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and went into analysis with Karl Abraham. Following a stint in the Austrian cavalry in World War I, he returned to Vienna to practice and serve as secretary of the Vienna society.
 
It was in defense of Reik as a non-medical analyst that Freud was inspired to write “The Question of Lay Analysis” in 1926. After living in Berlin, Reik became fearful of the implications of the rise of the Nazi movement and moved to The Hague, and finally to New York in 1938. Poorly received by the medicalized psychoanalytic culture then prevalent in the U.S., Reik founded his own institute, NPAP, in 1948.
 
Among his many books include Listening with the Third Ear (1948), Masochism in Modern Man (1941), and The Psychology of Sex Relations (1945).
 
For information call Tom Wagner at 212.691.7158.
 
Refreshments will be served. Please RSVP by May 28 at admin@npap.org by calling (212) 924-7440.