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The four papers included in the symposium were presented at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, on April 20, 1950, in a programme commemorating the Sixtieth Anniversary of Clark University.
1Heinz Werner. Introduction: The Conception of Genetic Psychology.
In his introduction to the symposium, Heinz Werner, Professor of Genetic Psychology at Clark University, paid homage to G. Stanley Hall, first President of Clark University, and the 'father of genetic psychology'. It was Stanley Hall who extended the invitation to Freud to speak on psycho-analysis on the occasion of the nineteenth anniversary of the University. G. Stanley Hall's dynamic view of child psychology stressed not only the importance of ontogenetic studies, but also placed the subject within the wider field of studies of organic development. It was precisely his dynamic evolutionary approach to the deeper layers of mental life which made him realize the revolutionary nature of psycho-analysis. And this, moreover, was in the face of the current trend in America at that time towards an essentially behaviouristic, adynamic psychology. The present symposium bears witness to the fact that once more child psychology is turning in the direction of Stanley Hall's work: towards a genetic, dynamic, and organismic approach.
2Anna Freud: The Contribution of Psycho-analysis to Genetic Psychology.
Anna Freud opened her paper by considering the great changes which have come about in the last forty years in America, in the relation between psycho-analysis and genetic psychology. From the first isolated attempts of pioneers like Brill, Putnam, and Hall, psycho-analysis finds itself to-day linked not only with psychiatry, pedagogics, medicine, but also with sociology, anthropology, criminology, and academic psychology. Contact between psycho-analysis and academic psychology occurred comparatively late and has varied greatly in kind and closeness. Various kinds of mutual approach between the two disciplines