You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
For reasons intrinsic in its approach psycho-analysis—unlike other branches of scientific organization—has been spared a struggle for the emancipation of our women colleagues. Thanks to the pioneering spirit of the early psycho-analysts there has emerged a galaxy of women analysts whose brightness radiates into every corner of our work.
Among British psycho-analysts there is no other woman member who has endeared herself to all her colleagues as much as Dr. Sylvia Payne has done. The advent of her seventy-fifth birthday offers an opportunity to give public expression to our feelings of admiration and gratitude for her work as a clinician, as a teacher of and contributor to the science of psycho-analysis, and above all as an organizer and conductor of our scientific and professional affairs.
For well over thirty years Dr. Sylvia Payne has been a devoted, tireless and wise counsellor to our Society. It was soon after the First World War, when she had relinquished the post of Commandant and Medical Officer in Charge of the Torquay Red Cross Hospital, and had just been honoured by the title of Companion of the British Empire, that she joined the British Psycho-Analytical Society and trained with James Glover and Hanns Sachs. Back in England and reunited with her husband and her growing children, she helped more and more actively to shape the British Psycho-Analytical Society and Institute, discharging in the course of time with exemplary skill, conscientiousness, and consummate tact all the offices the Society and Institute can entrust to its members.
Among her scientific contributions, 'A Conception of Femininity' and 'Some Observations on Ego Development of the Fetishist' are outstanding examples of her searching mind and its integrative qualities.
Called upon in 1944 to preside over the Society at a time of internal crisis, she soon proved her success in combining the traditional British realism, firmness, and genius for compromise with a deep appreciation of psycho-