Youthful visitors and hospitable hosts: exercises in misunderstanding

This article explores Gordon W. Allport's account of his visit with Sigmund Freud and Milton J. Nauss's account of his visit with Albert Einstein when they were young men. The analysis focuses on how the visitors' preconceptions of their hosts influenced the conversation; on their hosts' use of humor to spare themselves more painful emotions and their visitors the painful consequences of such emotions; and on the fact that both men's subsequent accounts misunderstand their hosts' attitudes and behaviors, thus indicating that they had not learned as much as they might have learned about themselves from the encounter.