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The new edition of the IPA's Bulletin has a number of special features. The 38th International Congress was held in the beautiful city of Amsterdam, against the backdrop of its canals, its charmingly idiosyncratic architecture so full of local colour, and benefiting from the warmth of its people. The democratic spirit of the country and its population imbues human relations here with respect and dignity. The Dutch character, portrayed for us so humorously by the indefatigable Paul Citroen in his introductory note, made for a level of contact during the Congress which is not always achieved at international events, with Henk Jan Dalewijk, Han Groen-Prakken and Nikolaas Treurniet constantly at our side to accompany us and guide us on our way. Henk is a great President, who, like other men and women of his generation, surely represents the IPA of the future.
The Nederlandse Vereniging voor Psychoanalyse was founded in 1917, when the IPA still had only seven Component Societies. Two figures were in my view pre-eminent among the pioneering group of the Dutch Society: August Stärcke and J.H.W. van Ophuysen. Without ceasing to be a practising analyst, Stärcke was a lone genius, who made outstanding contributions to entomology and sociology as well as psychoanalysis. With exceptional clarity of vision he discovered the precursors of castration and, following in the footsteps of Freud, he constructed a theory of paranoia which emphasises the importance of the faecal cylinder (the scybalum) and the reversal of libidinal sign in ideas of persecution. Also in the years around 1920, with similar ideas to those of Stärcke on the scybalum as a persecuting penis, van Ophuysen too contributed to the theory of paranoia. As we know, after some initial reticence, Abraham in his famous essay took up the thought of the Dutch school, which was the starting-point for his theory of partial love and subsequently found its continuation in the Kleinian conception of internal objects.
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