Second Day

C. Yorke: Before we start this afternoon's proceedings, it seems a fitting occasion to recall that it is ten years since Anna Freud died and the idea of this Colloquium was one that she had nourished for a year or two before it was actually initiated. She always wanted to have a meeting at which sufficiently like-minded people could get together to discuss important psychoanalytic issues. I say ‘sufficiently’ like-minded advisedly, because she felt, as most of us do, that healthy disagreement is an absolute necessity for progress in any discipline, and in ours in particular. But I think she also became very dissatisfied with some of the larger Congresses at which participants were really speaking in quite different languages, and therefore without any real possibility of the kind of controversy that stems from people who at least know and define their positions, and have enough in common with the basic principles of psychoanalysis to be able to discuss and develop the discipline. It was in that spirit that she wanted us to gather and I think she would have been delighted, and perhaps even a little surprised, that ten years after her death we still meet for these rewarding discussions and take great pleasure from doing so. Later this afternoon there will be an opportunity again for people to discuss the form that the Colloquium takes, but I think the spirit is very much as she envisaged it; and, in that sense, the annual Colloquium is a way of remembering her and her contributions.