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I feel it a great honor and an equally great responsibility to represent the American Psychoanalytic Association in this important period of its existence.
In two respects this year is a significant one. In recent years due to the adversities in European political and social events, the development of psychoanalysis has shifted its center from Europe to this country. The culmination of this development was reached recently in the dissolution of the Viennese group, the oldest and one of the largest and most active centers of psychoanalysis. Words cannot express the shock of these events upon all of those who devote themselves to the practice and furthering of psychoanalysis. Although the European developments came neither suddenly nor unexpectedly, yet it is almost impossible to realize that the founder of psychoanalysis, in the eighty-second year of his life, has had to leave his residence in Berggasse 19 to accept the hospitality of a foreign country. If individuals have a deep influence on the development of human thought and on the course of human fate, Sigmund Freud is certainly an example. Freud and the Viennese psychoanalytic group are forced to leave Vienna; psychoanalysis however has its home in the whole world. It has become an integral part of modern thought and, as a therapy, an integral part of modern medicine.
A few years ago the breaking up of this great European center of psychoanalytic teaching and research would have been an even greater catastrophe. In the past several years, however, strong centers of psychoanalysis have sprung up in this country upon the foundations that were laid down by the