Looking Backwards—And Forwards

When I first heard that our Scientific Committee wanted to devote an evening to my work, I felt honoured, grateful in a way which perhaps only another old man could understand, and surprised, for although I have often been secretly conceited about something I have written, some early reviews convinced me that others were not always in agreement. Even the expression 'my work' seemed strange to me for much of it is very different from the usual work of an analyst who sees new facts which seem to require modified interpretation in a patient's material and then discovers that they are appropriate to other patients too, and so enriches theory. (For example, Mrs Klein) My so-called 'work' seemed to me to be a series of what I first thought were bright and original contributions to pure theory, though I almost always discovered that I had got them from others, often through combining the ideas of two or more people—in other words, 'internal parents'. But I think there is a considerable difference between what I wrote before and what after the second war.

So in trying to decide how I should deal with what is called 'my work' this evening, instead of trying to summarize it, it might be more interesting if I tried to analyse my motives for wanting to do it at all—but, of course, only in rather a superficial way and without exposing myself too much.

As to the start of it all, my mind takes me back to when I was about 6, and stimulated by an older idealized cousin who showed me with a reel of cotton, a nail and an old pencil, how to convert rotary into reciprocating motion. This started me off on my first or first remembered ambition to be original and invent an aeroplane—presumably an ornithopter—in other words, I suppose, to be in projective-identification with my part-object parents. This ambition stayed with me for many years and no doubt influenced my decision to join the Flying-Corps in the first world war. And indeed at the age of 10, I built a boy-carrying glider, w