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BRIGADIER GENERAL WILLIAM C. MENNINGER, M. C.
I wish to express my appreciation to the Nominating Committee for the honor they have accorded me in suggesting my name for the presidency of the American Psychoanalytic Association. I regard it as a warm tribute and an expression of high confidence. However, I feel that in fairness to the Association and to myself, I should like to express my feelings and hopes about our Association.
First may I express my conviction that much of the real meat in psychiatry has come from psychoanalysis. I have been keenly aware of this before my Army experience, but the necessity to understand the many milder disorders and the combat casualties in the military reënforced the importance of the need of all psychiatrists to have a dynamic orientation that can be provided only through indoctrination by those familiar with psychoanalytic theory and practice.
In the past I have had little contact with the Association's organization and affairs and, therefore, am not too familiar with the details of its history and present aims. My impression of the Association over the last ten years—and they are held by many of us outside the 'inner circle'—is that there has been too much discord, which our critics have delighted to capitalize. One of our first aims must be to develop a spirit of unity toward the enormous jobs to be done so that personal differences and sectional disagreements will be eclipsed.
My experiences within the Army, coupled with my conviction of the needs and the great possibilities of a socially minded, militantly organized, and