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At the mid—year meeting of The American Psychoanalytic Association, held on December 27, 1925, at The Cornell Club, New York, the attendance was very gratifying, both from the point of view of numbers, and the quality of the audience. The papers, a list of which is given below, with the abstracts of some of them, were listened to with interest, and aroused active and intructive criticism.
BURROW, TRIGANT, Baltimore, Md. Presidential Address: Social Evasion.
OBERNDORF, C. P., New York. The Berlin Psychoanalytic Clinic.1
JELI IFFE, S. E., New York. Psychoanalysis and Somatic Disease.
EMERSON, L. E., Cambridge, Mass. Illusions and Ideals in Psychoanalysis.
WHOLEY, C. C, Pittsburgh, Pa. Moving Picture Demonstration of Transition States in a Case of Multiple Personality.
6. STRAGNELL, G., New York. Relationship of Anxiety to Solicitude.
TRIGANT BURROW, M.D., Ph.D. Our Social Evasion.2—Actual experimentation with groups makes clear beyond question the wide disparity between the analytic position we occupy in regard to the neurosis as it exists in the individual and the position we hold toward this same manifestation when confronted in its mass or social amalgamations. Technically viewed, the position of the group is identical in its social systematization with the position occupied by the neurotic in his individual systematization. The neurotic fully believes unconsciously in the egoistic images that are the projection of a system that is private and personal to him. Likewise the social group is unconsciously no less a prey to images that are the projection of a system that is wholly esoteric and dissociated.
Although as individual analysts we have endeavored to maintain a strictly scientific attitude toward our individual patients, we have not maintained as consistent an analytic position with respect to the personality of society at large. In our exclusive preoccupation with mental processes in their ontogenetic aspect, we have failed to take into account the study of these sam