My intervention briefly addresses the long, complex debate on technical and educational issues within British psychoanalysis during the late 1930s and 1940s. I hope to show that some of the problems discussed and the resolutions proposed by the Training Committee of the British Society during the years of the Controversies which we are commemorating are still a source of food for thought today, in spite of the fact that they belong to a specific past. I stress the importance of Strachey's ideas about an open psychoanalytic forum. This would not be the solution to all our problems, as crises and dissent are an inevitable part of the development of our discipline. However, the more transparent and the more informed we are about our past, and about the whole internal history of our discipline, including the wider cultural, scientific and socio-political context within which psychoanalysis developed and is developing, the better chance we have of understanding our present.