Annie Reich

Annie Reich, born Annie Pink in Vienna in 1902, was a psychoanalyst who became a leading theorist of the analytic world in New York after the Second World War. She was the daughter of a school teacher and a merchant, studied medicine at the University of Vienna from 1921 to 1926, and began her own analysis with Wilhelm Reich, whom she married, later continuing with Hermann Nunberg and Anna Freud. She joined the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1928, later belonged to the Berlin society, and emigrated to the United States on the eve of the war, where she served as president of the New York Psychoanalytic Society from 1960 to 1962. Her writing treated female submissiveness, narcissistic object choice, grotesque humor and the damage childhood can do to self-esteem, and she contributed to the technique of analysis through papers on countertransference and on ending an analysis. Her work is described as a bridge between ego psychology and self psychology. She died in 1971.