In a ceremony on December 3, 1976, the Baltimore-District of Columbia Society and Institute for Psychoanalysis presented a first edition copy of Sigmund Freud's Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) to officials of the Library of Congress. The book was given in commemoration of the Bicentennial and in honor of the sixty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the American Psychoanalytic Association in Baltimore, Maryland. The presentation was attended by forty Society members, Institute faculty, library staff and their guests. It marked the culmination of a fund raising drive within the society to purchase the book, which had been offered for private sale to one of its members. The initiative of Drs. Zelda Teplitz, Society librarian (DC), and George Roark, Society President, and the generosity of over thirty subscribers assured the success of the drive.
Dr. Roark presented the book to the Assistant Librarian for Public Education, Mr. James Parton, who expressed the Library's appreciation for the Society's thoughtfulness in filling the Library's Sigmund Freud Collection. Among Society members and guests who made brief comments on the significance of the occasion were Drs. James F. Bing and Leon Ferber, Codirectors of the Institute; Dr. Francis McLaughlin, immediate Past President of the Association; Mrs. Helen Fischer, Administrative Director of the Association, who represented its President, Dr. Herbert Gaskill; and Dr. Arcangelo D'Amore, Chairman of the Association's Committee on History and Archives.
Mr. John C. Broderick, chief of the library's manuscript division, and Mr. William Matheson, chief of its rare book and special collections division, spoke of the genesis and scope of the Sigmund Freud Book Collection and of the Freud Archives (separately administered), one of the Library's more important holdings in the behavioral sciences. Comprising nearly 40,000 items, the Freud Archives and Book Collection include the holographic manuscripts of his books and articles, books from his personal library, family and personal correspondence, a miscellany of biographical and other items concerning Freud, papers of a number of Freud's European and American colleagues, as well as the archives of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Miss Anna Freud, Dr. Kurt R. Eissler, and an anonymous benefactor have been largely instrumental in the acquisition of this impressive collection of documentary material. Access to all but a small portion of the Archives is restricted at the request of the donors until the year 2000. However, the use of the Book Collection is unrestricted.