96 Gloucester Place: Some Personal Recollections

The change in traffic regulations now makes it probable that a visiting psychoanalyst staying at a West End hotel will travel along Gloucester Place on the way to St John's Wood. I have seldom taken this journey without looking at No. 96 and recalling the years when, as a candidate and recent graduate, I spent on the average three hours a day in one of the consulting rooms where I saw my control cases, eating my supper in the candidates' common room, and attending seminars and scientific meetings later in the evening.

I doubt whether recent or contemporary candidates have regarded the Institute as a second home to this degree. My own experience reflects the state of organized psychoanalysis, at least in England, during the decade which preceded World War II. When I first started to attend seminars there were only some eight candidates at approximately the same level of training. We were a small intimate group, talking shop while we had a light supper prepared by the caretaker, Mr Knight. The library was close at hand. Our control patients sat in a common waiting-room discussing both their analysts and their analyses with considerable freedom. We all knew a good deal about each other's patients, not only from the reports given at clinical conferences but also from each other and from our patients' frequent references.

Our small class of candidates was probably the first in England to develop some organized group activity. This resulted in certain changes in the relation of the Society–Institute to its candidates in training. John Bowlby was, I believe, a leader in stimulating us to act as hosts at a party for the members of the Society–Institute. Although eminently successful, I can still remember Ernest Jones's raised eyebrows and the shared concern of the training committee. It was considered a marked innovation to allow any extra-analytic communication between candidates and their teachers and supervisors. Not long afterwards, however, the previous polic