The dark before the dawn

Allow me to congratulate whoever was responsible for devising the title of this meeting. The inspired inclusion of 'The Dawn' conjures up so many poetic images and metaphors. But the one which, to my mind, is the most appropriate in the context of what the meeting is all about, is that written by Thomas Fuller, a seventeenth-century cleric and man of letters and, incidentally, a graduate of this great university (Cambridge). In his 'PISGAN- sight of Palestine' he opined, 'It is always darkest just before the day dawneth'. These words have a particular relevance for me and for those embryo psychiatrists of my generation who, before the outbreak of the Second World War, groped their therapeutic way towards the light.