Advancement in Psychoanalysis*

A new organization of this type must have a reason and a justification for existing, and I would like to take advantage of this occasion to outline briefly the aims and aspirations of this new group.

The cardinal principle by which we shall be guided is our firm conviction in the worth and dignity of the human individual; the belief that human beings in social situations should and, if fairly well adjusted, can have a fundamental liking and respect for one another, that each of us should and can acknowledge a fundamental validity in the other, and thereby acknowledge that the other has certain rights which all must respect and which all must guarantee will be respected. This is a matter of particular importance in an age like ours, torn as it is by a struggle to the death between those who believe that the difficulties in human relationships are to be settled by the use of force and those who believe that such problems may be solved by a process of mutual adjustment.

The search after truth—the characteristic activity of every field of science—can be carried on successfully only in circumstances where the individual searchers have a basic respect for each other, and each therefore grants to the other the right to investigate in his own way and to draw conclusions which accord with his own experience with the particular order of facts with which the science deals. This is what is meant by academic or scientific freedom, the freedom to think as our experience dictates and the freedom to communicate these thoughts, and it is clear that respect for others is the only basis upon which such freedom may exist.

It might be expected that the field of science in itself would be immune from the conflict between the believers in force and the believers in mutual adjustments which so sharply and painfully characterizes our era; that here in a field whose characteristic activity — the impartial search for objective truth — is in danger of being paralyzed if there is not that mutual r