ABSTRACT
S. Freud personally recommended Reik, and it was Reik's rejection that prompted Freud to write his essay on lay analysis, in which he said the humanities provide a better background for psychoanalysis than medicine. Art, poetry, drama, history were closer to psychic reality and more important in feeding psychoanalytic intuition. Students with background in the humanities grew up around Reik. He gave a seminar that eventually grew into the first non-medical psychoanalytic institute in New York City, the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. It accepted students from humanistic disciplines, with backgrounds in art, acting, writing, philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology, music. The medical monopoly on psychoanalysis and the United States did not last. Fresh experience grew outside the establishment, and with struggle and time, began to enrich the latter. Knowledge contributes and knowing suffocates. Knowledge has a politics of dominance, who knows best, the king of the mountain.
