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I consider it a great honor to be invited to give the lecture which once a year brings us together to commemorate the founder of your school, a great teacher who challenged the established ways and opened new paths of psychoanalytic inquiry and understanding.
As for myself, I hardly feel like an invited guest, so close have been my personal ties to you and so akin to yours has been my orientation. In what other society, of which I am not officially a member, do I find so many personal friends? Some of you have been schoolmates of mine in the medical school; some of you had your residency in the same or neighboring hospitals; most of you have been and are more than colleagues, companions in the various phases of that adventurous journey which is psychoanalytic life.
Ladies and gentlemen, the topic which I want to discuss tonight is one which has interested me deeply for many years: the relation between the psychological factors which originate in the individual and those which originate from the external world of interpersonal relations. This is a vast and controversial topic, and I can touch only on some aspects of it.
If we examine the problem in a historical prospective, we see that the pendulum has swung back and forth. When the view of the classic Freudian school prevails, the tendency is to emphasize those inner-world processes which are reputed to come from the instincts; when a neo-Freudian and especially a Sullivanian point of view prevails, the tendency is to consider only those influences which derive from the external environmental factors. But the truth is that both sets of factors are important and the functioning of the psyche is only the result of this meeting of the inner and external worlds. A Freudian approach is seen by many today as a reductionist one, and a Sullivanian approach is also unilateral. I think that the Freudian and the Neo-Freudian eras have now to be replaced by a “neo-neo Freudian.”
With my early works I joined the large group of autho