Past Impressions
Prior relationships cast a long shadow over our social lives
By Bruce Bower
In a 1948 book, psychoanalyst Theodore Reik described an extraordinary “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”–type identity change that he underwent in the minds of many patients during therapy sessions. At the start of each encounter, Reik wrote, patients perceived a bald, elderly man with a big nose and glasses who presented a thoughtful, friendly demeanor. In other words, they saw the therapist for who he actually was.
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In the heat of therapy sessions, however, the real Reik disappeared from the patient’s mind. Referring to himself, the clinician wrote in Listening with the Third Ear (Farrar, Straus, and Co.) that “during the past hour the patient may have been considering this same man as near to God or close to Satan; he may have seen in him his grandfather or father or a representative of any one of the figures that played an important role in his life.”