Success Quote by Theodor Reik

Reik’s line flatters love and diagnoses it in the same breath. Calling love “an attempt” immediately strips it of destiny and halo: it’s effortful, provisional, a project with a failure rate. Then he quietly relocates its raw material. Love doesn’t start from the beloved as they are; it starts from a “dream world,” the private theater where desire edits people into symbols and scenes into promises. The sting is in “piece.” We don’t try to manifest the whole fantasy; we select a fragment we think we can win, a manageable shard of the impossible.

The subtext is classic psychoanalytic realism: love is not primarily discovery but transformation-by-projection. We fall for a person and, at the same time, for a script we’re trying to stage through them - safety, repair, recognition, a second chance at an earlier wound. That’s why the phrase “change ... into reality” feels both romantic and coercive. To love, in Reik’s framing, is to pressure the world to comply with an inner image. The beloved becomes collaborator, canvas, or obstacle.

Context matters: Reik worked in the Freud-adjacent era when the unconscious wasn’t a metaphor but a machine thought to drive everyday life. Against sentimental accounts of love as pure authenticity, he spotlights its engineering: the way we recruit partners to make the invisible visible. The quote lands because it tells the truth lovers hate to admit - love’s tenderness is often inseparable from its insistence.