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Professor Lajos Székely died on 28 June 1995. He was born on 20 October 1904 and we celebrated his 90th birthday in conjunction with the 60th Anniversary of the Swedish Psychoanalytic Society. He was present, interested, curious, and alert as always, and he raised the level of a ceremony devoted to remembering our Society's past, welcoming, congratulating and honoring him at the same time. A way of commemorating him is to reiterate the address he listened to with his unforgettable mixture of controlled, joyful openness:
“If we did not already know that all men, and most of all those of prominence, are Hungarians, it would be somewhat surprising that you, who have made such an impact on and were so important to the development of the Swedish Psychoanalytic Society, are a Hungarian, born in Budapest 90 years ago. You can look back with satisfaction on an extremely eventful life, knowing that you have always been able to establish a platform to develop yourself, where you could work and produce creative ideas, notwithstanding how often you hade to change your place of residence, made necessary by the conditions in Europe between and during the two World Wars.
You received your Ph.D. in 1926 at the University of Budapest. Driven out by the prevailing anti-semitism in Hungary, you moved to Frankfurt in 1930, then to Heidelberg in 1932 (where you met Edith, your life partner, wife, psychoanalytic colleague, mother of your two children), in 1934 to Amsterdam, in 1936 to Leningrad, in 1938 to Finland and at last, in 1944 to Sweden. You made the acquaintance of Sandor Ferenczi through your first published paper, ‘Psychoanalysis and philosophy of history’ and