You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
ONE OF THE PLEASANT perquisites of the presidency of the American Psychoanalytic Association is the opportunity to address the Association and its guests on a Sunday morning, as the Sunday morning lecturer. A Sunday morning lecture, by tradition, need not be as compact as the usual scientific paper. It allows the lecturer to present his views on a subject in a somewhat more personal way than is customary in a scientific presentation. What I have to say this morning will take advantage of this opportunity.
I have chosen to give my Sunday morning talk now, rather than six months or a year hence, as has become rather the custom in recent years, for a very personal reason. It was in 1942, twenty-six years ago, at a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in Boston, that I first had the opportunity of addressing the Association in this very room. Partly because of the war, partly because the Association was so much smaller then, the meeting was very different in 1942 from what it is today. The entire scientific program occupied a day. It consisted of a few papers, not more than five, as best I remember, each of which was read and discussed in plenary session. My own role was that of scheduled discussant for one of the papers.
Twenty-six years ago, no sensible person would have dared to predict the tremendous growth of the Association that has in fact taken place. Indeed, then, as now, the imminent demise of psychoanalysis as a profession, as a movement, was sadly predicted