First Day

C. Yorke: May I say, on behalf of the staff and students of the Anna Freud Centre, how delighted we are that you have been able to join us once again. In many ways the colloquium is for us the high spot of the year. It is the time when we have a chance as on no other occasion to exchange views and ideas about psychoanalysis. I would only add that over the difficult years that followed the loss of Anna Freud, these occasions have been a great source of support to us; and we have also been very conscious of the fact that, through these meetings, a tradition has been continued which she had long wanted to establish.

A. Valenstein: When I accepted the invitation to chair the opening session of this colloquium and also to introduce it with a brief historical overview of our topic, I had not quite realized into what I was getting myself. I knew that it was a broad subject, that for our purposes it would have to be narrowed toward that sector which is central to our interest, experience and expertise, namely psychoanalytic psychology. Even so, we might do well to orientate ourselves within a broader framework, and especially to take account of some of the main features which have been added since Freud first posited a bisexual predisposition as one of the basic psychoanalytic assumptions governing psychological development and behaviour. Finally, when I began to read some of the extensive literature, I became aware that to do the topic justice I should have to spend much more time at it than was available to me, and that it could become encyclopaedic. So I ask you to bear with the fact that what I bring will be