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How, I ask myself, am I to celebrate a 15th anniversary. 15 years is too old for a Barmitzvah address, that mixture of congratulations and warnings fit for the onset of puberty; perhaps an early coming of age would be more appropriate; for an Institution 15 years' duration is already quite lengthy. Having been given a free hand by the organisers to choose my own subject I thought my somewhat elaborate title appropriate for the celebration of an organisation that stands for innovation and change in the understanding and treatment of disorders of mental and emotional life. My intention is to present psychotherapy as an historical process, a process of development but also of decay in our understanding of the mind. We so often take progress and development for granted, that what we do today must be an advance of heretofore, that we build on the solid foundations left to us by our forefathers. May this not, however, turn out to be a wish fulfilment, an illusion, a family romance of psychotherapy in which we count ourselves lucky to be the inheritors of royal mantles. A harder look at our own history may give us a different picture, then we can heed the warning given to us by Santayana, for those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it.
So I turned to the history that I know best, which is my own personal history in psychotherapy.
In 1953, during my psychoanalytical training, I was invited to select two books as gifts to myself from the Ella Freeman Sharp Memorial Fund. The two that I chose reflect the two tracks that I have followed in my career and represent the vantage point, the binocular vision, from which I attempt my survey. You will, I hope, gather what that position is from my description of these two volumes.
One book was Trends in Psychoanalysis by Marjorie Brierley, published two years earlier in 1951. Marjorie Brierley had a very high reputation as a theoretician in the British Society. The book is a closely argued set of reflections on the develo