The Psychoanalyst in the Community of Scholars

As a psychoanalyst, I am accustomed to seeing the world and its events as they are reflected in the experiences of the individual. I am thus tempted to react to the honor bestowed upon my work and myself by speaking in personal terms of what the support of a great institution such as this University has meant to the thinking, working, and creating self. The moral support that institutions can provide for the lonesome worker is indeed important. I feel, however, that the significance of the occasion is not definable within the framework of individual psychology, and I have accordingly decided on a subject for my talk more in keeping with the deeper meaning of this day. The title of my essay, The Psychoanalyst in the Community of Scholars, is, therefore, meant to indicate that I have set my sights on a broad topic: I will examine the relationship of psychoanalysis to the university; or, stated in more general terms, I will discuss some problems of the integration of a specific new system of thought, psychoanalysis, into the established body of the intellectual life of our time as it is represented by our universities.

As all of us know, and as we seem to have accepted with some resignation and without too many questions—although we should be deeply disturbed and puzzled by the fact—psychoanalysis and the universities have on the whole not been on good terms. It remains illustrative of the lack of integration of analysis within the university that, when Freud received finally, after many delays, his professor's title from the University of Vienna, it was given to him not for having made some of