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When one has followed, as I have done, the successive steps of the development of psycho-analysis, now more than half a century old, one goes back to examine and to wonder what place it has won for itself in the rapidly evolving cultures of today. I do not claim to be able to exhaust such a vast subject. To do so would require information and knowledge which I do not possess, and which, probably, is now possessed by no one. One can, nevertheless, try to understand something of the present-day societies, according to their attitudes towards psycho-analysis.
There are, of course, countries, outstandingly America, in which it has spread and its acceptance has been immense. A great number of persons there have become concerned with it intimately. Psycho-analysis has transformed the attitude of parents towards their children, and it has contributed towards a diminution of that restrictiveness towards sexuality from which women have suffered for such a long time, owing to the double standards of sexual morality which reign in patriarchal societies. But the reactionary forces on the look-out in all countries, even in America, still seek all too frequently to stigmatize it. And in those countries where totalitarianism has triumphed, whether of the right or of the left, psycho-analysis has not been recognized. For no authoritarian community can tolerate freedom of critical investigation. And what calls for more freedom of thought than the process of psycho-analytical examination, exposing as it does the unconscious depths of belief and those categorical imperatives which blindly drive mankind?
Wherever there is still some liberty, psycho-analysis would seem to prosper. But even in America there are restrictions which hamper it. It tends more and more to be subjected to the discipline of Medicine, especially so since the advances of psychosomatic medicine. Its province goes well beyond ordinary medical specialization or therapy and could, therefore, become unduly re