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Before proceeding with this Evaluation Session, I would like, by way of introduction, to share with you a few of my thoughts at this moment and to comment briefly about what I consider to be of paramount importance for psychoanalysis at this time. First, I feel deeply moved by the honour which has been bestowed upon me this week, as well as sobered by the enormous responsibilities which go with it. During what for me has been a very momentous week, and at a time of such excitement and overstimulation, there has of course hardly been time for me to have prepared any refined or polished statement. However, the very spontaneity of these remarks provides me with an opportunity to concentrate only on essentials, and to try to get to what I consider the core considerations at this particular moment in our psychoanalytic history.
In this connection it is of interest to all of us that it was almost simultaneous with this Congress that man achieved one of his greatest technological advances, an epochal breakthrough in his mastery of the physical world. It was just before our present Pre-Congress began, actually during the pre-Pre-Congress held in London, that man took his first steps on the moon, and that a date was established which will be recorded in history books as a giant leap forward for mankind.
It happens, by coincidence, that for some time recently I have been in the process of writing a book review, for the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, of Robert Waelder's last book, Progress and Revolution—A Study of the Issues of Our Age. In it Waelder points out the lag which has occurred throughout history between scientific and technological achievements on the one hand, and moral, humanistic and democratic progress on the other. Every technological and scientific advance, Waelder points out, has led to as many destructive as beneficial effects, has had as many victims as benefactors. Nor was it Waelder's way to present such a view in a causal or undocumented manner. Rather