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Mr. Chairman and Honored guests: First, I want to take this opportunity to express my appreciation to Professor Besdine and the Board of Directors of NPAP for choosing me as chairman of the Memorial Meeting Committee to pay tribute to the memory of our esteemed Dr. Reik.
We have just heard from four eminent psychoanalysts who were close friends and colleagues of Dr. Reik. Each of them dealt with one of the many areas of accomplishment that comprised Dr. Reik's work. This gives us but a glimpse of the vastness and complexities of his life and interests.
As the final speaker on this panel I would like to use my few minutes to speak of him not as the professional but as Reik the human being. An incident comes to my mind which gives a vivid portrait of the kind of rare human being he was.
In March 1960 I had a minor crisis in my life. My younger son Richard was to become Bar Mitzvah and decided to face me with his first adolescent rebellious confrontation based on this need to be compulsively honest. He was willing, he said, to put up with the party and presents, but he refused to memorize the “canned garbage” speech that the Rabbi wrote for all the Bar Mitzvah boys. When I suggested that he write his own, he replied “There's nothing I have to say. It doesn't mean anything to me.” I had to think fast. In the emergency I recalled that I had just finished reading Reik's latest book Mystery on the Mountain, and that somewhere he mentioned that the Bar Mitzvah ceremony was an outgrowth of the primitive puberty rites of the savages. I mentioned it to Richard. It