Professor Freud's Seventy-Fifth Birthday*

We are assembled here this evening to do honor to a great man on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday. Whatever the world may think just now of Professor Freud's contributions to science, no one can deny the tremendous effect which they already have had on modern thought. As I have said elsewhere: “When Professor Fraud cast the psychoanalytic stone into the lake of knowledge at Vienna the waves that were caused by the disturbance spread and spread and spread until they finally washed the shore of every country in the civilized world. No farthest land has escaped their influence and no department of learning but has had to reckon with them. The Greek philosopher's maxim that ‘Man is the measure of all things’ has been infinitely broadened and deepened by this new knowledge, and the science of human behavior and the meaning of philosophy as a guiding line of human conduct and aspiration, have been relegated from the obscure places and been given practical significance in daily living.”

It is because of this wide and revolutionary effect upon thinking in all branches of learning that Professor Freud's contribution has been thought of in direct line with the contributions of the great thinkers of all time. You who are familiar with psychoanalytic literature will recall the analogies with Copernicus and Darwin and remember how the contribution of Copernicus, considered from the psychoanalytic point of view, was a wound to man's egoism or more technically his narcissism, how it jogged him loose from his smug, complacent position in the Ptolemaic universe where he and his world