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Dear Sir,
In an article in your issue of July 15 dealing with the case of my pupil, Dr. Theodor Reik, or, more precisely, in a section of it headed ‘Information from Psycho-Analytic Circles’, there is a passage on which I should like to make a few remarks by way of correction.
The passage runs: ‘… during the last few years he has become convinced that Dr. Reik, who has gained a wide reputation from his philosophical and psychological writings, possesses a far greater gift for psycho-analysis than the physicians attached to the Freudian school; and he has entrusted the most difficult cases only to him and to his daughter Anna, who has proved quite specially adept in the difficult technique of psycho-analysis.’
Dr. Reik himself would, I think, be the first to reject any such account of the basis of our relations. It is true, however, that I have availed myself of his skill in particularly difficult cases, but this has only been where the symptoms lay in a sphere far removed from the physical one. And I have never failed to inform a patient that he is not a physician but a psychologist.
My daughter Anna has devoted herself to the pedagogic analysis of children and adolescents. I have never yet referred to her a case of severe neurotic illness in an adult. Incidentally, the only case with moderately severe symptoms verging on the