Address—Glimpses of a Freudian Odyssey2

When in one's anecdotage one likes to refer to one's own activities and, on the twenty-first birthday of a movement, is offered the opportunity, may I briefly sketch some of my contacts with the situation.

On a previous occasion, speaking before the Kings County Medical Society (1929), I referred to the 40 years of my development in the psychotherapeutic movement.1 In that talk I mentioned my impregnation. It dealt with a case of so-called "hay fever", now more the fashion to be termed "allergy". I had just graduated in medicine and preparatory to serving my interneship in St. Mary's Hospital in Brooklyn, in which city I had lived shortly after my birth, I took a two weeks' vacation at my favorite place of recreation on Lake George in the Adirondacks. A classmate of the Physicians and Surgeons was there courting my father's brother's daughter. A friend of his was also in the offing. With this friend I daily walked to the post-office and back, a mile or more, and among other things he told me how happy he had been for the past three weeks or so, especially as he had always had to spend the time about July for a month or two at Bethlehem, N. H., because it has been the only place he had found in which he was free from "hay fever".

This had been a sore infliction now for ten years or more since he was about the age of 12. He was sick and tired of this New Hampshire resort to which other similarly afflicted pilgrims were wont to gather. Curious then, as now, I inquired as to the reasons, the meanwhile congratulating him upon the extension of his topographical possibilities and also noting that what was Bethlehem's loss might be our gain. He told me, innocent as we both then were of the appaling allergic possibilities which have since come like a cloud of locusts upon us, that it was due to the fact there was no ragweed here. Here is where I almost committed the sin of Onan and might have remained sterile all of my life. Virtuous and virginal as I was to psychot