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One of the unexpected pleasures of living on New York's upper West Side is to catch an occasional glimpse of Theodor Reik, beard flying in the wind, hurrying with his still remarkably youthful walk along its polyglot streets. (One is tempted to turn to his oblivious neighbors and say, “Do you realize who that man is?”) I mention Dr. Reik's milieu because he himself tells us that his “main field of observation for the psychological differences of the sexes” is now the school on 86th Street across the street from his window. In the same way he uses the sights and sounds of the streets on which he walks to add more links to the chain of memories and associations which has become the hallmark of his style.
Where is Dr. Reik hurrying, and why? “Why not?” this seventyeight year old pioneer of psychoanalysis answers in his Introduction to these Observations of an Old Psychoanalyst. “A has-been like myself must also be somewhere and working on something. Why should I not occupy myself with those small questions that are not often posed and yet perhaps can be answered?” Theodor Reik has been answering big and little questions of human behavior for a long time. On the title page of his latest offering, I counted twenty-five published books. He has reached the stage now where he can dispense with footnotes and bibliographies and write completely from within himself.
In this sense, Dr. Reik's latest book is more like the journal or notebook of a novelist than the “papers” of a scholar. One recalls particularly the Notebook kept by Anton Chekhov in the years 1892-1904 in which single sentences, phrases, short paragraphs fix observations of the human comedy which would require a story, a novel or a play to explicate. Here is a random sampling from both sources:
The difference between men and women: a women, as she grows old gives up more and more to female affairs; a man, as he grows old, withdraws himself more and more from female affairs.- Checkhov
I have often wondered how many mi