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Your Excellency, distinguished guests, colleagues, and friends: I have great pleasure in offering the sincere thanks of the Executive Council of the International Psychoanalytical Association to His Majesty the King for accepting the Presidency of the Honour Committee for this Congress. We also thank the Ministers for Education and Culture for indicating their support in accepting to be members of the Honour Committee (and the Minister of Health for honouring us with his presence today).
We are particularly grateful to the Mayor of Madrid for the hospitality which this beautiful city will offer to our members during the next few days. The offer to open the Prado Museum on Wednesday evening is one that will long be remembered by all participants in this 33rd Congress.
This is indeed a memorable occasion, in so far as it is the first time that our Congress takes place in a Spanish-speaking country. Through a happy coincidence, the Spanish and Portuguese colleagues, as most of you know, are this year celebrating the 25th anniversary of the founding of the original Luso-Spanish Society, later to divide into the Portuguese and Spanish Societies. Furthermore, this is the first occasion on which the Madrid Association takes part in this biennial event as a fully independent Society. I am sure you want to join me in offering the Madrid Association our very best wishes for the future. All of us in the IPA are particularly indebted to such a young and small Society for carrying the heavier burden of supervising on a day-to-day basis the practical arrangements that bring us together this week, over the last several months. That they should have accepted this onerous task at short notice, with the full support of their Barcelona colleagues, and under the able guidance of Dr Pere Bofill, the Chairman of the Organizing Committee, is indicative of their generosity and devotion to psychoanalysis.
Both Societies, of course, alongside their Portuguese neighbour, include several