Contrary to the blandishments of the salesman and to the apparent ease and slickness of video demonstrations, the establishment of a videotape closed circuit television (CCTV) set-up requires considerable forethought and careful planning. Any psychiatric unit or University Department that can afford to employ full-time technicians solely to organize, operate and look after the set-up will probably not find this report relevant. The manpower costs would exceed all other costs and we would be speaking in terms of tens of thousands of pounds. However, one avenue is worth exploring: if a teaching hospital has an associated audio-visual centre it may be possible for the Department to negotiate to buy sessions of a specialist technician’s time. The cost of such a technician might well be covered by a research proposal grant.

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.