The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (, WPV), formerly known as the Wednesday Psychological Society, is the oldest psychoanalysis society in the world. In 1908, reflecting its growing institutional status as the international psychoanalytic authority of the time, the Wednesday group was reconstituted under its new name with Sigmund Freud as President, a position he relinquished in 1910 in favor of Alfred Adler. During its 36-year history, between 1902 and 1938, the Society had a total of 150 members. Prominent members Sigmund Freud Alfred Adler Wilhelm Reich Otto Rank Karl Abraham Carl Jung Sándor Ferenczi Guido Holzknecht Isidor Isaak Sadger Victor Tausk Hanns Sachs Ludwig Binswanger Carl Alfred Meier Sabina Spielrein Margarete Hilferding Herbert Silberer Paul Schilder First meetings In November 1902, Sigmund Freud wrote to Alfred Adler, "A small circle of colleagues and supporters afford me the great pleasure of coming to my house in the evening (8:30 PM after dinner) to discuss interesting topics in psychology and neuropathology... Would you be so kind as to join us?" The group included Wilhelm Stekel, Max Kahane and Rudolf Reitler, soon joined by Adler. Stekel, a Viennese physician who had been in analysis with Freud, provided the initial impetus for the meetings. Freud made sure that each participant would contribute to the discussion by drawing names from an urn and asking each to address the chosen topic. New members were invited only with the consent of the entire group, and only a few dropped out. By 1906, the group, then called the Wednesday Psychological Society, included 17 doctors, analysts and laymen. Otto Rank was hired that year to collect dues and keep written records of the increasingly complex discussions. Each meeting included the presentation of a paper or case history with discussion and a final summary by Freud. Some of the members presented detailed histories of their own psychological and sexual development. Active years As the meetings grew to include more of the original contributors to psychoanalysis, analytic frankness sometimes became an excuse for personal attacks. In 1908 Max Graf, whose five-year-old son had been an early topic of discussion as Freud's famous "Little Hans" case, deplored the disappearance of congeniality. There were still discussions from which important insights could be gleaned, but many became acrimonious. Many members wanted to abolish the tradition that new ideas discussed at the meetings were credited to the group as a whole, not the original contributor of