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Colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this symposium which is presented by the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis on the occasion of its 25th anniversary, in association with the American Institute for Psychoanalysis and the Karen Horney Clinic. This is our third symposium. In the first we dealt with “Alienation and the Search for Identity,” in the second with “Psychoanalysis as a Creative Process.” Today's topic, “The Changing Image of Man: A Challenge to Psychoanalysis” grew out of our clinical experience.
More and more often we have had to stop in our daily work to ask ourselves: What are we doing, what are we striving for? With what kind of being are we dealing? Can human nature change? What are its limits? How can we best function as catalysts of human growth?
A radical inquiry became necessary, in the sense of “radical” meaning going to the roots. What is our image of man today? What is its challenge to psychoanalysis? Man has a biological, a philosophical, a psychological and a social aspect, and therefore we have asked leading scientists of our time to help us. Some are here today. Two others whom we wanted very much, are not.
Today, on the sixth of November, 1965, Kurt Goldstein, who honored us by becoming an honorary member, would have celebrated his eighty-seventh birthday. In deep agreement with Karen Horney, Kurt Goldstein saw it as a “basic tendency of the organism to actualize itself in accordance with its nature … this actualization means existence, means life.”1 Goldstein devoted much of his thinking to the relation between concrete behavior and the abstract attitude which he saw impaired in the schizophrenic. In his last writings he expressed his conviction that human life cannot be wholly understood through these two attitudes alone. To grasp the fullness of life, one must consider the area of human experience which he called the “sphere of immediacy.” Here “we are involved in our totality… In this sphere is not only the source