An Interview with Theodor Reik (Tape)

This is four hours of Theodor Reik. The tape consists of two twelve-hundred-foot reels, and the audio quality is quite good. Doctor Reik is questioned on an almost bewildering variety of topics by a number of psychiatrists and psychologists affiliated with the Philadelphia Mental Health Clinic.

Reik's answers to the questions are less directly responsive and more in the nature of anecdotes and reminiscences of his fifty years' experience. But this is by no means a shortcoming since Reik is at his best when he is permitted freely to share his wisdom with us at his own pace and on his own terms. Listening to him provides us with the rare opportunity of participating in significant events at the outset of the psychoanalytic movement and of sharing the company of personalities who contributed to the development of psychoanalysis.

The interview, of course, is replete with anecdotes about Freud, many of which are as yet unpublished, but he also has much to say about many others. These include Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Ernest Jones, Karl Abraham, Herman Nunberg, Albert Einstein, Eugene O'Neill, Marie Bonaparte, and Edmund Bergler, to name only a few. His references are not confined exclusively to the past. He even includes a few animadversions on Albert Ellis and this reviewer.

The interview contains almost endless riches. He talks of phobias; and of the strange mother who would rather have a girl baby than a boy; of penis envy and of vagina dentate; of Freud's wife and of the