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This lecture marks the anniversary of the founding of the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago twenty-five years ago by Franz Alexander. Fortunate Franz Alexander, non sine honore a prophet, who robbed Juvenal's goddess Fortuna of her divinity by his foresight. But this anniversary is not a local matter. It is a significant mark for all who esteem psychoanalysis and are concerned for its teaching and for its progress as a science. It is a moment for retrospection and reflection. I deeply appreciate the honor shown me by the invitation to deliver the First Alexander Lecture and to voice some of the thoughts appropriate to the occasion.
Many come to mind readily which relate to the rapid rise and development of psychoanalytic education. The year 1932, in which the Institute in Chicago was founded, was a good one for psychoanalysis in the United States. For some years previously, many Americans had studied psychoanalysis abroad, and the example of the new institutes there, particularly the one in Berlin, was making a strong impression on this side of the water. In several American cities the psychoanalytic groups, having grown in membership, desired and were better able to organize the education which was necessary for a psychoanalyst. Dr. Alexander was the first distinguished teacher invited to this country from one of the admired foreign institutes. Other signs of the same élan were the similar invitations to other teachers in the older European communities, the founding of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in the same year 1932, and the first issue of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly in April of that year. In 1933 came the real beginning