Annie Reich

Annie Reich (née Pink; 9 April 1902 – 5 January 1971) was a Viennese-born psychoanalyst who became a leading analytic theorist in post-war New York.

[1] Thereafter Annie Reich moved with her children to Prague, to become part of the circle around Otto Fenichel; before emigrating to the United States on the eve of World War II.

After an early publication on the successful treatment of a paranoid (1936), Reich produced a study of female sexual submission in terms of identification with the partner's superior body (1940).

[4] In this way she was able to fend off temporarily the condemnation of her own strict superego, in a struggle that had however to be ceaselessly renewed, and whose occasional failure led to deep depression.

She restated the classical view of countertransference as the projection of past attitudes and feelings of the analyst on to the patient,[7] in opposition to the interactive view then coming to the fore of countertransference as revealing something about the patient: the methodological challenge she presented of distinguishing between the two still remains cogent.