Theodor Reik. A Student's Memoir

Theodor Reik I first met personally ten years ago, when I was invited to fill a place in a private seminar Reik was presiding over at the home of an analytic psychiatrist in New York City. The others in the seminar were advanced professionals—teachers and supervisors in their own right. Compared to them I was a youth, still in the midst of those numerous and prolonged apprenticeships you serve in an effort to gain some understanding of Freud's difficult legacy. Naturally, in such a group my situation was not without ambivalence, and to make matters worse, my general hostilities at that time were getting a lot of mileage out of my status as an earnest student. How Reik handled me from the very start was, as I was to observe in the years thereafter, typical of his versatility as a teacher and of his vision of the function of a teacher, a function he addressed as much to the long-range career problems of the student as to the didactic material at hand.

Reik's arrivals on such occasions were distinctive. Often as not he showed up wearing a beret and entered upon the scene festively, animated, full of high-pitched greetings. He had gotten rather heavy—this was before the coronary that scared the wits out of us—and his round face beamed. He enjoyed his celebrity, but he never made you uncomfortable with it; he never exploited it temperamentally. Sensual is the word for his handshake, as it is for many of his gestures—the way he smoked cigarettes, for example, drawing hugely and inhaling with delicious vigor—in those days he was never without the elegant box of Benson & Hedges, which he fondled as he spoke.

Initially, I was surprised at the personal inquiries Reik interspersed with his various helios, inquiries that verged on gossip about yourself and absent friends and colleagues. Subsequently, I was to spend parts of many meetings with him giving him a run-down on people we knew in common. He would nod attentively, his eyes alert with pleasure. Though diplomatic, he was ne