The Trauma of Birth in its Importance for Psychoanalytic Therapy*

It gives me great pleasure to join the American Psychoanalytic Association for the first time, and to have the opportunity of personally meeting and getting to know the representatives of psychoanalysis in America whom I have long ago known from their writings. And I should very much like you also to consider my appearance more as a personal introduction. And so I have in mind to give you only a general impression of what I consider my own personal contribution to Psychoanalysis, certainly as concisely as possible, even at the risk of becoming extreme.

I warn you beforehand that I do not intend to prove anything to you, nor do I wish to convince you. Also I do not expect you immediately to form any opinion or judgment about what you hear until you have tried to prove it in your own analytic work. I would prefer you to listen as if a traveler were relating to you his experiences in a yet undiscovered country.

I have recently published a book, entitled “Das Trauma der Geburt und seine Bedeutung fur die Psychoanalyse” (“The Trauma of Birth and its Importance for Psychoanalysis”). I am very sorry that I am not able to start my talk by giving you a definition of what the Trauma of Birth really is. I could not do this without giving long explanations. For those, I can only refer to the book itself.