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TO BEGIN WITH I WOULD VERY MUCH LIKE to thank the American psychoanalysts for the great honor they do me, and the great pleasure they give me in inviting me to speak to you at the general congress of your celebrated association. In fact I consider this invitation as having a scientific significance which it pleases me to be able to underscore. There was a time when the relations between psychoanalysis and what your predecessors referred to (with some contempt) as academic psychology were complete misunderstandings arising from mutual neglect (to be euphemistic). Since then, the representatives of scientific psychology, who have the advantage over you of not being bound to any school, have come, with varying speed, to understand the importance of the central ideas of Freudian psychoanalysis, and have incorporated them into their general theories of conduct, again, with varying degrees of modification. But apart from some exceptions, notably Rapaport, his pupil P. Wolff, Spitz, Cobliner, and others, psychoanalysts have rarely referred to experimental work. Today, in contrast, you have as a topic a subject which bridges psychoanalytic theories and theories of intelligence, and you have invited a man who, although he has experienced a didactic analysis (since he believes in knowing something of the questions about which he might be called upon to speak), has always adopted the attitude of a rather impertinent heretic when it comes to the