The hundredth birthday of a great man is one of the external landmarks which we use from time to time as an opportunity to look back in order to gain whatever perspective is possible. Time is a strange critic. Things that have been written some time ago show varying degrees of obsolescence. Many are no longer read because they are like yesterday's newspaper; they are stale, like yesterday's bread. Some obsolesce in a month, a year, a generation, while others have kept their freshness over hundreds and thousands of years. On this hundredth anniversary of Freud's birth, about half a century has passed since his main works were written. Half a century is not very long, but it is something, particularly in a time of rapid change like ours, and I think one can say when one reads Freud's work today that, with very few exceptions, it is as fresh as if it had only just been written. The degree of obsolescence of Freud's work in fifty years has been extremely small. There may be two radically different reasons why older things hold little interest for us. One, as mentioned before, is that they