The Chairman of the panel, Robert S. Wallerstein, introduced the formal presentations with a historical overview. He noted that in 1926 Freud, under the title The Question of Lay Analysis, wrote his spirited defense of Theodor Reik, a prominent nonmedical member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, who was charged with a breach of an old Austrian law against "quackery"—a law which made it illegal for a person without a medical degree to treat patients.

The response to Freud's treatise among psychoanalysts was immediate, and it brought to the fore wide-ranging differences of opinion. A long series of 26 reasoned responses by prominent analysts from seven leading centers on the two continents was published simultaneously in the following year in the two official psychoanalytic journals of the time.

Freud, in a postscript to this book, lucidly and comprehensively