The aim of this reprint of a 1962 work by Willi Hoffer of London on the social and scientific obligations of the psychoanalyst is to show the significant role he played in the restoration of psychoanalysis in Germany after 1945. At the same time, it is our objective to compare his theories from the beginning of the 1960s with the current status of psychoanalysis based on two contemporary commentaries by two former chairmen of the German Psychoanalytic Association, Georg Bruns und Martin Teising. Clinical contributions by Reiner Winkler and Wolfgang Walz enhance this volume which concludes with the 20th Karl Abraham lecture in Berlin held by the Parisian psychoanalyst Laurence Kahn, an article on the theory and the technique of psychoanalysis as well as the 13th Wolfgang Loch lecture by Peter Dettmering on psychoanalysis and literature.