Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis

We continue our year-long celebration in the issues of the 75th Volume, and I would like to recall the words of William Silverberg, the first president of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (AAP) (Silverberg, 2015, p. 229). On September 24, 1941, just four months after the establishment of the AAP and the American Journal of Psychoanalysis (AJP), Silverberg delivered his first presidential address at the New York Academy of Medicine. In his address, Silverberg (1942) talked about the missions of the AAP.

The cardinal principle by which we shall be guided is our firm conviction in the worth and dignity of the human individual […] 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.

These principles are powerfully impacting psychoanalytic work too, continued Silverberg.

The search after truth […] 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 is the unfortunate fact that [in] the field of psychoanalysis […] groups have been found who have not hesitated to use power and force in the attempt to silence dissenters, who have had so little faith in the fundamental worth and dignity of other human beings that they have attempted to deny to their colleagues and fellow-searchers that freedom of thought and communication without which no valid scie