I accept this scroll, which documents the establishment of a Sigmund Freud Chair at the Hebrew University, in the name of the International Organizing Committee, with great joy and sobriety. I only regret that Miss Anna Freud is not here, in my stead, to receive this scroll in the name of her father. The establishment of the Sigmund Freud Chair to exist in perpetuity in this new-old place, Jerusalem, is symbolic of the elemental and fundamental quality of Freud's discoveries about the human mind.
As you all know by now, Freud, together with Einstein and Buber, was among the first trustees (governors) of the Hebrew University in 1925. Lord Balfour, in giving the inauguration address at the Hebrew University in that year, counted Freud among the three great Jewish men of modern thought in the twentieth century: Bergson, Freud and Einstein. Freud expressly wanted to see established at the Hebrew University, which he proudly called “our university,” a new seedling of psychoanalysis under the leadership of Eitingon. This was in 1933 when Hitler's bookburning foreshadowed the end of free science and art in Europe, and when the holocaust consumed not only all of Jewish existence in Europe but threatened also all that was worthwhile in Western culture.
You know that Freud reacted with some bitterness when, at that time, his wish to have psychoanalysis taught in the halls of the university was denied. It is therefore most gratifying to all of us to be participating in the righting of this wrong, at this very moment. We witness here today, the affirmation that psychoanalysis has a future contribution to make not only in this old-new land, but that its role is a central one for the survival of mankind.
During the course of the drive for a Sigmund Freud Chair at the Hebrew University, we have encountered objections and skepticism about its establishment from our own colleagues and friends. Some felt that psychoanalysis should not be taught in a university setting. Such an objection might have some pertinence for the specific education of a psychoanalytic practitioner. However, the magnitude of Freud's conception inevitably made it so that psychoanalytic psychology was not to remain only a possession of the few. Its significance for the knowledge of man became general.
In 1926 Freud wrote: “In my youth I felt an overwhelming need to understand something of the riddles of the world in which we live and perhaps even to contribute something to their solution.” And in the same paper, The Question of Lay Analysis, he demanded that a psychoanalyst's education “include elements from the mental sciences, from psychology, from the history of civilization and sociology, as well as from anatomy, biology and the study of evolution.” And then, in 1933, in his exchange of letters with Chancellor Magnes of the Hebrew University, he saw psychoanalysis in a mutually fertilizing, interdisciplinary relationship with all the humanities as they are taught at the university. Psychoanalysis shares with all true sciences and all true arts a continuous and absolute insistence on perpetual search. They cannot stay satisfied with the concept of extant, revealed truth. It is this very process of continuing search that is in itself life-affirming. And this leads me to some thoughts beyond the Freud Chair.
I made reference earlier to the central significance of psychoanalysis for the survival of man. Never before in man's history has there been a greater urgency to gather all human forces in the service of assuring the survival of our species on earth.
In his correspondence with Einstein in 1932 on Why War?, Freud previewed the total threat to humanity's existence. He said, “Owing to the perfection of instruments of destruction a future war might involve the extermination of one or perhaps of both the antagonists.”
We can now say with fearful certainty that there is no more “perhaps.” The threat is universal. At a recent conference in Paris on nuclear disarmament in which several Nobel prize winners took part, Sean MacBride, the Irish statesman, a Nobel laureate himself, said that “there were already 20% more nuclear weapons deployed than are necessary to destroy the human race.” I emphasize deployed, not counting those in reserve. And, when most recently the United States debated the creation of the neutron bomb, the headline in the New York Times of June 17, 1977 read more thoughts about the unthinkable. It is exactly with that courage to face the unthinkable with which Freudian psychoanalysis is involved. After all is said and done, whether we speak about technology, economy, food supply or epidemiology, nothing is now as menacing to human survival as the human mind itself.
Psychoanalysis is an indispensable portal to the knowledge of the human mind and the impulses it promotes. Never was it more important to learn all there is to know about the control of our impulses than now. It is for this reason that I feel the Sigmund Freud Chair which has been created in such a short time essentially by you, the psychoanalytic professionals, should ultimately be expanded to a Sigmund Freud Center for the Study of Man and his Survival. The chair would then become a central pillar for an interdisciplinary effort on an advanced studies level, which would cover man's development, consider prevention, tension-making and man's capacity for finding avenues for sublimation.
The United Nations in New York, or in Geneva, and other institutions for peace elsewhere have not given sufficient attention to the centrality of human psychology. They are too much involved in problems of technology and day-to-day political realities.
From where but this city of Jerusalem, which literally means “City of Peace,” should such a life-affirming effort come forth? Where else do we find such a variety of peoples living so close together? Where else is the issue of survival so close to consciousness as here? And what city has carried throughout the centuries a wider mystique than Jerusalem? It is with this dream in mind, and in the hope that there is still some time left to work toward its fulfillment, that I accept, in the name of the International Committee, this scroll, establishing the Sigmund Freud Chair in Psychoanalysis at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Finally I wish to thank the members of the search committee who I know are hard at work seeking to find the right person to occupy the Sigmund Freud Chair in Psychoanalysis, and I wish to extend our sincere good wishes to whomever will be the first to bear this honor, to carry the burden, to pursue the mission, to have the vision of bringing our hopes toward fruition.
Pictures of Sigmund Freud will be available for purchase at the forthcoming Winter and Spring Meetings at a cost of $100 for a framed picture and $75 for an unframed one. Proceeds will go to the Sigmund Freud Chair in Psychoanalysis at the Hebrew University.