The recent death of the Hollywood director, Billy Wilder, calls to mind a radio interview with him that I happened upon some twenty years ago. Wilder was a fount of interesting and amusing stories. Among other things he reminisced at length about his childhood and youth. How did someone born in Austria come by the name of Billy? His name was really Samuel. His mother, however, had developed a crush, during a youthful visit to the United States, on Buffalo Bill.

What interested me most in the interview was Wilder’s account of a meeting with Sigmund Freud in 1924. At the time, Wilder was an eighteen year-old dropout from the University of Vienna, who was working as a reporter for the Viennese newspaper Die Stunde. It was the custom of Die Stunde to pose a monumental question – for example, Do you think that there will be a second World War? – then dispatch a reporter to ask prominent people, such as Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, or Richard Strauss, to respond. So it was that Wilder called upon Dr. Freud at Berggasse 19. The question centered on Freud’s opinion of Mussolini and Italian fascism.

Wilder’s account of his visit follows. A maid, to whom he gave his calling card, ushered him into a waiting room from which he could hear the sound of cutlery meeting dishes and smell some delicious scents. The Freud family was at its midday meal. This impression was confirmed when, after a short wait, Freud entered the waiting room, napkin tucked under his chin, with Wilder’s calling card in hand. He approached Wilder, scrutinized the card, and then inquired, "You are a reporter for Die Stunde?" "Yes," replied Wilder, whereupon Freud pointed to the doors and said, "Raus." I should add that the reputation of Die Stunde was that of a gossip sheet that featured sensation at the expense of fact.

An amusing story, I thought, but did it really happen that way? Would a mittel European gentleman be that rude? I put it down to theatrical hyperbole on the part of Wilder, but I have come to reassess this opinion as a consequence of reading a letter written by Freud in 1933 (Freud, 1956, p. 154). Freud was responding to an Argentinean poet, Xavier Bóvida, who had written to him after reading an interview with Freud published in a Buenos Aires newspaper. Freud was not at all happy with the interview and says of the interviewer, one Dr. Ludwig Bauer: ". . .with the habitual unscrupulousness of a journalist who is always eager to sacrifice the truth for the sake of being effective, Dr. Bauer ascribes to me assertions I never made, to ask questions I never asked, to make gestures that I never made. Thus I appear in his description as an old fool."

Peter Gay’s biography of Freud (1988) provides additional evidence of his jaundiced view of the press. In 1928, for example, he wrote, "I may permit myself to wonder why you still believe anything you read in an American newspaper" (Gay, 1988, p. 353). So it would appear that some fifty years later, Wilder’s remembrances were indeed accurate.

References:

Freud, S. (1956). Four unpublished letters of Freud. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 25, 147-154.
Gay, P. (1988). Freud: A life for our time. New York: Norton.

---

Mervin Freedman, Ph.D., a Board member of CICSW and an editor of Clinical Connections, practices in Berkeley.

back to top