… So much about the conduct of our meetings; I want now to start a discussion on our research work. In particular I want to raise two questions: as to the possibility of organizing our work more systematically and as to the direction in which, at this moment, research is most likely to be profitable.

So far as I know psycho-analytical research, at any rate in this country, has in the past been mainly a by-product of clinical medicine. In one sense it always must be so—clinical investigation must give us the material for scientific theory; but it has been a by-product in the sense that it is almost a chance result. I mean that analysts have usually accepted just whatever cases offered themselves; there has not been a practice of selecting for treatment cases that might throw light on specific problems. There has certainly been some specialization, and child analysis is the most obvious example, but there has not been much