Fifty Years With Freud

When Miss Freud asked me last year to give the first of a new series of Sigmund Freud Lectures at the Hampstead Clinic my astonishment was matched by my immense pleasure at being so signally honoured, coupled with a feeling of unworthiness and unfitness for the task. Nevertheless, to have declined the invitation would have called for a degree of virtue of which I did not find myself capable, for I was given a unique opportunity to pay a birthday tribute to the man whom I have learned to honour above all others of our modern times, to Sigmund Freud 127 years after the day of his birth. The only reason I can imagine why this precious privilege should have been bestowed on me is the fact that I have been engaged in the study and practice of psychoanalysis for upwards of fifty years. The first Birthday Lecture should have been delivered on 6 May last year. Most unfortunately Miss Freud was taken seriously ill before this could happen. She naturally wished very greatly to be present herself on the occasion. It was therefore decided to postpone the lecture, but alas her condition did not improve sufficiently and finally, as we all know, the illness proved fatal. We are accordingly celebrating the birthday of Sigmund Freud a year later than had been planned; and at the same time, with profound sadness, mourning the passing of his illustrious daughter, who was responsible for so much of enduring value. Butfor her I should not be addressing you here today.

Miss Freud suggested that it might be useful for my remarks today to take a historicaltrend; I expect that she had that fifty years in mind, especially since they began in Vienna, the birthplace of psychoanalysis. I welcome the suggestion, but it must be said that the history of psychoanalysis has been very adequately and extremely ably documented by infinitely more learned and scholarly writers than myself, above all by Ernest Jones. Andso I had to ask myself what I could possibly say that had not been profoundly researche