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In the past few years a number of Reik's earlier works have been collected into several volumes. Thus The Compulsion to Confess 1 contains not only the original essay of this title but also The Unknown Murderer and in addition a group of articles under the title The Shock of Thought . In Reik's preface to The Compulsion to Confess (1959) he introduces these latter essays as “gleanings of several years,” i.e., as a kind of remainder from his thinking on self-betrayal and our need to expose guilt.
Now in Sex in Man and Woman: Its Emotional Variations Reik again refers to his contribution as “gleanings,” this time from The Emotional Differences of the Sexes. 2 Reik again implies that these gleanings are mere tidbits, not to be taken seriously in any scientific sense. He states that they are only by-products which may some day be useful.
The format of Sex in Man and Woman consists of anecdotal observations of how men and women differ in the very marrow of their existence. Here are two samples:
Certain men sometimes have the impression that women at a social party or at other occasions “gang up against” them; that they have means and methods of secret communication among themselves. There are, these men assert, certain glances over the shoulders of the men, certain smiles and amused gestures from one woman to the other. There is even a kind of “conspiratorial whisper.” (p. 80)
There are certain processes and emotional developments in the one sex which the other does not understand or understands to a very limited extent because their physiological and biological premises are missing. Which man really (not only intellectually) knows what goes on in a woman before the menstruation sets in? Which mother comprehends the urgency of sexual drives in her son during puberty? Can she emotionally imagine his desperate fight against masturbation, his vows not to yield to the temptation and his unavoidable relapses? Women do not easily recognize the conflict even some ascetic men have