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Obviously this represents a very formidable occasion for me. I have worked out that Freud's seventieth birthday occurred roughly at the time I was born. So between us we span a fair length of time—going well back into the nineteenth century—during which it would have been disappointing if psychology had stood still.
When I look around the room I see that there are many people here who could be expected to know very much more about certain aspects of what I am going to say than I do myself. I won't mention them all by name, but it reminds me of a story told me by a friend at Peterhouse, who reported that when A.E. Housman was dining at Trinity and got a little tipsy, he said in his after-dinner speech that he found himself there in a room which had seen Wordsworth drunk and Porson (the notoriously bibulous Greek scholar) sober; and here he was, a far better poet than Porson, and a far better Greek scholar than Wordsworth, somewhere betwixt and between. That's where I lie, I think: between the physicians in the audience and the psychoanalysts; and both sets will have to forgive me any solecisms that I commit en route. I only wish I could feel that the ghost of Sigmund Freud would forgive anything of the sort; and it is alarming to be talking with his photograph looking down on me.
The question arises: what on earth was your Committee doing asking a paediatrician to talk to you on this kind of occasion? And I suppose the obvious answer is that in a lot of ways Freud, without, I think, himself having any great experience of children or babies, was forced by what one might call his archaeological explorations of the human psyche to look back to that particular period of life, like any scientist working in an evolutionary field might have to do in tracing how things have come to be as they are. But I think it is worth reminding ourselves