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Mr. Chairman, members of Dr. Reik's family who joined with us this afternoon, members of NPAP, ladies and gentlemen:
In being one of the last speakers I will naturally have to cover some of the things that were said by my predecessors here, but I would like to give it a somewhat more personal connotation in terms of what Reik meant to me.
Sigmund Freud has told us what the work of mourning is. In the work of mourning we try to accomplish two things. We internalize the person who has died, and we have heard today many efforts in the direction of such an internalization. We express it in the form of believing that his ideas will live with us—we all dedicate ourselves to his ideas, and so forth. But the work of mourning consists of another thing. It consists also of a sense of loss and a sense of separation. The sense of loss and separation is usually accomplished more silently and unconsciously, but I am sure that Theodor Reik would have wanted us to speak of both sides of the mourning process as we speak about him.
As I prepared myself to speak to you today, I evoked in myself an image, imaginary to be sure, of the time in 1910 when the 22-year-old Reik met the 54-year-old Freud. Now 1910 happens to have been one of the great periods in Freud's life. His paper of 1910 [“The Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy”] is perhaps among his most optimistic. At that time Freud was fully confident that within a relatively short time the neuroses would tend to disappear. Freud has emerged from his isolation and his loneliness. He is beginning to be recognized, but World War I has not as yet