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3rd March 1950.
Dear Dr. Fitzgerald:
Thank you for your letter.1 The real trouble with the psychoanalysts is that they are all working very long hours doing analyses and bearing quite heavy clinical burdens and also teaching those of the people being analysed who are candidates. The strain on the senior members at the present moment is terrific owing to the fact that it takes so long to create an experienced psycho-analyst, and since the war there has been a huge influx of candidates. While deploring this I do personally feel that it has to be accepted because with all the faults, some of them very obvious, which belong to the psycho-analytic society, there is this thing about it—that a consolidated scientific group is building which will be a very important factor in general psychiatric education eventually. What will be most likely to seduce members from these activities at the present time I am not certain. Certainly most of us would feel it to be a waste of time to sit on planning committees arranging some kind of teaching which would be a compromise between what are called various schools of thought.
In my opinion it is the psycho-analytic group which must eventually include what is good in all the other groups, and thinking of the future it is more important that the Society should concern itself with the research which will resolve the disagreements amongst its members than that it should try to be friendly all round. I am afraid that none of the other groups is capable of