Arnold D. Richards Psychoanalysis: A Personal Odyssey [Psychoanalysis]

Not surprisingly, my personal route to psychoanalysis goes back to childhood. My earliest lexical memory is of reading about the death of Sigmund Freud in 1939 in the Yiddish Forward when I was five years old. I remember the picture of the man with the beard, and the large announcement of his death that was first read to me by a grandfatherly figure who also had a beard and who taught me to read Yiddish and Hebrew. Before I reached adolescence, I had read about Freud in the encyclopedia and pursued some of the topics described there as part of my broader search for sexual knowledge. In retrospect, it is difficult to determine whether my interest in sexuality fueled my

interest in literature or whether it was the other way around. But I do remember reading novels by authors like Pearl Buck and Aldous Huxley both for their literary and for their titillating value.