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On this day, the founder of psychoanalysis reached the eighth decade of his life. From the struggles of early isolation when he pursued his investigations alone by the driving force of his creative genius, Freud now has had the satisfaction of seeing the universal spread of the new science of psychoanalysis. In the 1935 postcript to his autobiography, he states, “There can no longer be any doubt that it will continue: it has proven its capacity to survive and to develop both as a branch of knowledge and as a therapeutic method.” As we are gathered here to celebrate the birthday of Professor Freud, I should like to take the opportunity on this occasion to present some personal reminiscences of the development of psychoanalysis in Boston during the last quarter of a century, at the same time emphasizing the struggles and isolation of early workers in their attempt to combat the opposition towards its theories and therapeutic applications. Of the early antagonism towards psychoanalysis it may be said, as Pasteur said of his germ theories when he presented them to the Academy of Medicine, there have been no really constructive criticisms but only superannuated opinions. In his earlier work on Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, Freud made a statement based on his personal experiences with the hostility to psychoanalysis in the early years of its development as a basic science. “I received the impression that my book, The Interpretation of Dreams, created