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This article represents the contribution of Anna Freud to the symposium on genetic psychology that took place on April 20, 1950 as part of a program commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of Clark University. She discusses the historical development of the relationship between psychoanalysis and academic psychology. She finds them drawing closer together. Projective tests in particular have provided an avenue of access to the unconscious that is of mutual interest. Despite inherent difficulties, progress is being made toward the application of experimental and statistical techniques to psychoanalytic research. There are also promising attempts to reformulate the concepts of metapsychology and genetic psychology in terms that would establish a greater community between the two systems.
Citing the distinction drawn by Hartmann and Kris between the dynamic and genetic hypotheses of psychoanalysis, Anna Freud finds that the former are more likely to be used as a basis for special therapeutic techniques in borderline fields such as psychiatric social work and counseling, while the latter have gained influence in education and child care. Education, in its widest sense, might be regarded as an attempt to make the child adopt those solutions of conflict between the ego and the id which are acceptable to the environment.
Psychoanalysis, in its genetic investigations, tries to establish three developmental sequences: in instinctual development, in ego and superego development, and in successive interactions between these two. Differences among the id strivings of individuals are negligible in comparison with those differences in ego and superego structure which account for the infinite variety of personality and clinical patterns. There are comparatively few fixed relationships between specific infantile strivings and the ego methods that are brought to bear on them. As a result, it is difficult to validate the existence of infantile urges through inquiry into the re