Presidential Address the American Psychoanalytic Association—Boston, Mass., May 18, 1942

Psychoanalysis was born in 1893 when Freud and Breuer published a paper which laid the foundation for an organized discipline of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Nine years later, in 1902, an informal group of scientists gathered about Freud in Vienna. In 1908 there was an informal conference in Salzburg, and in 1910 the first International Psychoanalytic Congress was held in Nuremburg and the International Association was founded. In February 1911 the New York Psychoanalytic Society was organized; in May of the same year Doctor Brill and Ernest Jones arranged the first meeting of an American Psychoanalytic Association in Washington. In 1932 the American Association became a federation of psychoanalytic societies.

This year, therefore, marks the tenth anniversary of the organization of our Association in its present form, and lacks one year of being the fiftieth anniversary of the inception of psychoanalysis. For these reasons, it seemed appropriate to me to use this occasion to reflect audibly upon the structure and function of our organization in relation to psychoanalysis as a science, and its meaning not only for the world but for us who practice it.

We are gathered today in one of those annual incidents of coming together which characterize all scientific groups and, indeed, all human groups. We here have many things in common but the one thing in common which brings us together at this moment and under these auspices is our interest in a