Discussion

The Association is honored by Professor Bally's participation in our scientific program. I likewise felt honored when he discussed my paper1 on “Techniques of Dream Interpretation” in October, 1963 during a short visit to the United States. I feel it a privilege to be discussing his paper rather than presenting my own scheduled for

this evening. With his vast experience in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, his broad sociological orientation, and coming to us from his Swiss Alpine heights, he brings that democratic responsiveness, also called scientific rigor, so necessary for viewing the larger issues and confronting the big questions which he does so perceptively and penetratingly. On many occasions, since 1955, it has been my good fortune to have benefited from his matured knowledge. Our discussions occurred when I was in Switzerland, as lecturer at Burghölzli and guest in his home in Zurich and at his holiday cottage in the Ticino.

Professor Bally clearly points out that it was not the specialists (in this case, physicians) who were in the vanguard, but the public who demanded answers to their felt needs, whether in the long run these needs turned out to be constructive or destructive. The founding of our Association in 1941 was a manifestation of this phenomenon. While Horney was being excluded from authorized psychoanalytic circles, the public was welcoming her answers to The Neurotic Personality of Our Time. In the late twenties the majority of Germans felt that Hitler was “good” for Germany and shortly thereafter we felt that Roosevelt was “good” for the United States. The reality of history and of the sociological context, as each experienced it, was crucial. We also know, from Lord Acton, that power corrupts, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. In a democracy the distribution of power, the dilution of it, and the slowing of its acquisition forestalls the possibility of its acquisition in an absolute form. In the history of sciences and in the longer h