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Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I gladly accepted your invitation to commemorate Paul Federn by outlining his scientific achievements, for I was very grateful to you for having given me the opportunity to express my admiration for and gratitude to my first teacher in psycho-analysis. I was bound to him by deep feelings of friendship, and had remained in close contact with him, and followed the development of his scientific studies, for more than forty-one years.
Although I wish to devote the time I have for this presentation chiefly to the discussion of Paul Federn's unique contributions to the psychology of the ego, I do not want to leave unmentioned his other important contributions. In 1913 he published 'A Case of Nocturnal Fright, with Subjective Light Phenomena', and from that time on he revealed his psychoanalytic talent, psychological understanding, and scientific originality in many papers. Some of his findings in 'Sources of Male Sadism', in 'Some General Remarks on the Principles of Pain-Pleasure and Reality', and in 'Contributions to the Analysis of Sadism and Masochism' were cited by Freud. In 'A History of a Case of Melancholia' he clearly illustrated the pathogenic process which Freud found typical for melancholia, namely, the patient's identification with an ambivalently loved object.
In 1919 Federn published a pamphlet, Die Vaterlose Gesellschaft, which he translated as The Orphaned Nation: Essay on the Psychology of Revolution. Although this fascinating study was based on the concepts that Freud had expressed in Totem and Taboo, Federn's ideas about the function of the leader in sociopsychological organizations and the development of a democratic brotherly society appeared before and were precursory to Freud's expositions on Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.
His papers 'On Two Typical Dream Sensations' and 'The Problem of the "Inhibition Dream"' marked the inauguration of his studies on ego sensations in dreams, and opened a new