Dr. Bertram S. Brown, Director of The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), addressed a plenary session of the APsaA on April 30, 1971, during the Association's Annual Meeting. The title of his address was “Pride, Prejudice and Progress — New Trends and Opportunities for Psychiatry Today,” but Dr. Brown departed from his prepared text, and spoke, to a large extent, extemporaneously.

Citing an array of pressing social problems that confront the nation, Dr. Brown called on his listeners to bring to bear on these problems the special knowledge and skills of psychoanalysis. He quoted his predecessor, Dr. Stanley Yolles, who had said, in this regard, that “the psychoanalyst can have his couch and his community, too.”

In closing his talk, Dr. Brown spoke with great concern of the trend in many American communities to cut back funds for human services. He said of this trend, “I think [it] is a mistake, it is irrational, it is wrong,” and suggested that it constitutes a phenomenon urgently in need of study and understanding.