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HAVING BEEN INVITED TO SPEAK ON THIS OCCASION WHICH HONORS SIGmund Freud by commemorating his birthday every spring makes me feel pleased and proud. I delivered the Freud lecture in Vienna two years ago, so today's occasion gives me a sense of completion. Now I have expressed my indebtedness—intellectually, professionally, philosophically, and aesthetically—to the founder of psychoanalysis in the best way I know how. I have done this in the two cities where I learned the fundamentals of psychoanalysis, where I practiced it, where I came to realize the boundless complexity of this science, and where my mounting curiosity for the not yet fully understood had become the natural way of my clinical attention and of my thinking about the human mind; where, in short, I had followed, like every student of psychoanalysis, the lengthy and exhilarating, often painful and disappointing journey which we hope leads every analyst to the state and practice of the art.
My awareness of psychoanalysis as an awesome system of ideas, promising a limitless comprehension of the human mind, came to me first in the course of my fortuitous acquaintance with Anna Freud. This occurred in 1925, soon after I had arrived in Vienna to continue my studies in biology at the University of Vienna. Due to this circumstance my first impression of psychoanalysis was focused on childhood. Subsequently, again by fortuitous circumstances, my focus shifted; this