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It is a pleasure to voice the general appreciation of Dr. Bertram Lewin, and to honor him as he approaches his seventieth birthday. He is pre-eminent in the gifts that he has made to the development of psychoanalysis and especially to psychoanalytic training in this country. His interest has entered into and vitalized nearly every department of psychoanalytic education, contributing to the organization of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute thirty-five years ago and helping administratively to sustain its progress throughout its entire course. He also has taken an active part in teaching and individual training, as well as contributing richly to the literature, and has found time as well to participate in the activities of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
Dr. Lewin came from the University of Texas to enter the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore in the Fall of 1916, when he was just approaching his twentieth birthday. His intellectual brilliance, youthful animation, and a rare degree of enthusiasm were evident even then. In the years that followed, the extent and depth of his learning and knowledge have grown astoundingly. He possesses an unusual capacity for simultaneously showing and masking the extraordinary range of his intellectual concerns by a lightheartedness and gaiety in his manner, which has always made him particularly disarming to his students. Never ponderous, he is generally amusing and witty—a master of the pun and the rhyme. Here, too, Dr. Lewin's interest in words may be mentioned. On a firm, scholarly basis, it functions in him to produce a combination of a rare degree of precision of usage with a real flair for verbal style, sometimes resulting, among his many admirers, in sudden outcroppings of special verbal fashions or 'runs' on words.