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The 24th International Psycho-Analytical Congress was held in Amsterdam from 25th to 30th July 1965. It was an occasion saddened by the death, some months before, of the President of the Society, Maxwell Gitelson, to whom tributes were paid by Phyllis Greenacre and William H. Gillespie.
The main theme of the Congress was Obsessional Neurosis, and one's first reaction at the end of it was to marvel at how much Freud had been able to discover about this illness, and how relatively little we have advanced in understanding since Freud. While many new problems were raised and questions asked in the course of the Congress, few answers were provided. Perhaps the most important achievement of the Congress was that it provided opportunity for the interchange of views and ideas, and stimulation to further interest and research in this area of psycho-analytic study.
There were two opening papers. The first, presented by Elizabeth Zetzel, “1965—Additional Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis, Freud, 1909”, was a re-evaluation of the “Rat man” case.* The second, by Samuel Ritvo, “Correlation of a Childhood and Adult Neurosis: based on the Adult Analysis of a reported Childhood Case”, reported the adult analysis of Frankie, analysed in childhood by Berta Bornstein,† and correlated the childhood and adult psychopathology of the patient. Berta Bornstein's comments on Dr. Ritvo's paper were read for her, as she was unable to attend the Congress. Most of the first two days of the Congress were taken up by discussion of these two papers, in plenary and simultaneous language sessions, after which there followed a large number of papers. Many of these were concerned with various aspects of obsessional neurosis, but other topics were also covered. There were, for example, sessions on transference, acting out and psychosomatics, as well as individual papers on other topics. There were also several informal colloquia in the evenings, which covered a wide range of topics from methodologi