It is a great mistake to gauge the age of a person by the number of years he has lived. To remain productive and to be capable of changing one’s opinions is to stay young. Both of these attributes are highly characteristic of Professor Freud, as his latest works attest. One finds nothing in them of stagnation in dogmatic assertions or of exhaustion of the fantasy. Against his own earlier theses he is perhaps often too unsparing, and the breadth of his perspective often exceeds everything which he has created in the past. In conclusion, I wish to express the hope that this book will assist in dissipating an erroneous belief prevalent in certain circles. It appears that the general public have a decided tendency to confound Freud’s teachings and psychoanalysis, as such, with the subject of sex. “According to Freud there is only one _causa movens_, and that is sex!” is one of their mis-statements. Of course, faithful students of Freud’s teachings will never arrive at such fallacious deductions. True, the attentive reader of this book will find that Freud, as far as sex is concerned, allots to this instinct more importance than the prudery and hypocrisy of present-day society is ready to grant it. But, ever and again, Freud emphasizes the mastering of urges—not by repression, to be sure, but by elimination of all that which appears logically, ethically, and æsthetically undesirable. DR. S. FERENCZI. Budapest, Hungary. New York, September 1927. THE PROBLEM OF LAY-ANALYSES I It appears to me that the title of this treatise may require an explanation. Let me, therefore, state that the problem of Lay-Analyses expresses itself most succinctly in the question of whether medically untrained laymen should be permitted to practise psychoanalysis. This problem, timely in general, is subject to national laws. It is a timely question, in so far as, up to now, apparently nobody ever cared who was practising psychoanalysis. As a matter of fact, too little attention was paid to the question into whose hands the employment of this new science was entrusted, with unanimity prevailing only in reference to a more or less strong tendency to wish that nobody at all should practise psychoanalysis. There were different reasons for this well-nigh general aversion.