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I WANT TO CONGRATLUATE those of you who have come tonight to the end of a prolonged and arduous course of work. I congratulate you on your dedication to your profession: to the ideals of those who pursue, in our time, the elusive inner man, so gifted as he is with a perverse logic of his own, so rational in his irrationality, and on occasion so imaginative in his self-delusion. You have not hesitated to confront and to seek to help this singular creature. And now you reach a given goal. This is indeed a matter for pride and praise. Most of you, I am sure, will recognize with T. S. Eliot that "the end is where we start from." Translated into your terms, this will mean, I suppose, more seminars, more clinical sessions, more lectures.
If I follow the logic of this, I would seem to be an end-lecturer; yet I am also a starting-lecturer as well. If I mark the end of your training-period, I hope you will allow me also to mark a beginning of your new careers. Once one has qualified in one's own field, one has more time to look at related fields. Perhaps that is why your officers invited me to speak this evening. I speak for those of us who are concerned with literature, who profess a strong loyalty to our discipline—the discipline of letters, the study of man's verbal imagination and his ability to create and use symbols. I had occasion, a few years ago, to discuss before an audience of professionals like yourselves, the relation between biography and psychoanalysis. 1 Tonight