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It is my pleasure and honor to address you today, twenty-five years since I enjoyed the inspiring experience of becoming a young and eager member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and of joining my sixty-five fellow members at the Midwinter Meeting in New York in 1930. During these twenty-five years I have shared with my contemporaries in our profession an almost unique experience of participation in the development of a new field of scientific inquiry which could legitimately be thought of by most observers a quarter century ago as of dubious objectivity. Within so short a span of years—far fewer than it takes to traverse one's professional maturity—psychoanalysis has become a profession of many members, widely recognized to have some validity and value, and, indeed, to be a necessity for the scientific advancement of some fields of modern medicine. Gazing retrospectively, I cannot see that any criterion existed whereby I, or my predecessors in psychoanalysis, could have disproved those numerous critics who, familiar with our literature but not with our clinical observations, sometimes thought of us as crackpots, or emotional converts, or merely victims of perverted imagination, in 1930. One can only say, the events of a quarter of a century have proved that our youthful conviction in studying analysis was based upon true perception of its value as a useful tool of psychological exploration.
In 1955 we are an association of over 600 members. But this impressive number is today only a fraction of those responsible for analytic science, therapy, and education, if we consider also that candidates registered for training in fourteen Institutes and three Training Centers accredited by us recently numbered 925 physicians