On 6 May 1926, Freud’s 70th birthday, a man walked into a small room in 36 Gloucester Place, Wi. It was just before eight o’clock in the morning and he was about to become the first patient of the London Clinic of Psycho-Analysis.

It had been only thirty years since the term ‘psychoanalysis’ had been introduced to the world by Sigmund Freud, and the modest few rooms in which the new venture was launched were the site of one of the first established clinics for treating patients by psychoanalysis. In that first year less than a dozen patients were treated. Today, in its fiftieth year, the London Clinic of Psycho-Analysis is internationally recognized for its work and has an annual average of 130 patients under treatment in its present home, 63 New Cavendish Street, W.1. The number of applicants who have had diagnostic interviews in the past fifty years now stands at 4455.