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British Medical Journal, 1950, No. 1.
This is the psycho-analyst's contribution to a series of articles designed to cover the development of medical theory and practice between 1900 and 1950. It can be said of psychodynamic ideas that they have given a new dimension to medical thought, and this is especially true of psychiatry. The key idea to this great advance in medical theory and practice was published just fifty years ago by Freud in his Interpretation of Dreams. 'A clinician, without laboratory aids or other such devices, by the closest attention to the material before him, unpromising and the least worthy of scientific care as it was then thought, changed his speciality out of recognition and raised the potential of every doctor's clinical interview.'