“This is an historic occasion”, announced Francis Crick on 2 June 1966, as he began the opening address of the annual meeting of molecular biologists at Cold Spring Harbor. “There have been many meetings”, he continued, “about the genetic code during the past ten or twelve years but this is the first important one to be held since the code became known.” Such bold pronouncements usually guarantee that an occasion will linger in history's footnotes and never shine centre-page. But, as the first public presentation of the complete genetic code, the moment had some claim to being historically complementary to the publication of James Watson and Crick's first paper in Nature. In April 1953, in fourteen paragraphs and a diagrammatic sketch (contributed by Odile Crick), they had announced—with a minimalism that came more of urgent certainty than of diffidence or reticence—not just a physical structure for DNA, but something far more. “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing [of purine and pyrimidine bases] we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” The trajectory begun in 1953 with the suggestion of “a possible copying mechanism” completed its public arc at Cold Spring Harbor in 1966 with a very specific and (almost) complete table showing the genetic code. The occasion “marked”, as Crick later judged, “the end of classical molecular biology”.

Looking back at almost fifty years of psychotherapy in post-war Germany, Annemarie Dührssen (1916–98), one of the grand old ladies of the discipline, proudly presented a story of success in 1994. In the immediate post-war years, between 1946 and 1950, there were already a considerable number of individuals and groups all over the country active in establishing hospitals or outpatient clinics exclusively devoted to psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy; in 1950, the first university programme in the subject was set up in Heidelberg; in 1967, psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy was included in the catalogue of services offered by the statutory health insurance system; and in 1970, psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy had become obligatory subjects in the curriculum of medical students, resulting in the establishment of chairs in these areas at almost every medical faculty in West Germany.

During the Second World War, it is argued, “the neuroses of battle” not only deepened an understanding of “psychopathological mechanisms”, but also created opportunities for the practice of psychotherapy, while its perceived efficacy led to a broader acceptance within medicine and society once peace had returned. This recognition is contrasted with the aftermath of the First World War when a network of outpatient clinics, set up by the Ministry of Pensions to treat veterans with shell shock, were closed within a few years in response to financial pressures and doubts about their therapeutic value. In the private sector, psychoanalysis under the leadership of Ernest Jones remained an idiosyncratic activity confined largely to the affluent middle classes of London. According to Gregorio Kohon, “it was strongly opposed by the general public, the Church, the medical and psychiatric establishment, and the press”. The Medico-Psychological Clinic of London, originally set up in 1913, offered psychotherapy on three afternoons a week in premises at 30 Brunswick Square under the direction of Dr James Glover. However, it closed in 1923 after Glover and his brother Edward had both become psychoanalysts. As the First World War drew to a close, Maurice Craig helped to persuade Sir Ernest Cassel to fund a hospital for ‘Functional and Nervous Disorders’ at Penshurst, Kent, to treat neuroses in the civilian population. Although moved to permanent premises near Richmond, it remained small-scale and at the time no attempt was made to establish a network of similar institutions throughout the UK. The Tavistock Clinic, opened in Bloomsbury in 1920, struggled to secure funding throughout the interwar period and its efforts to win official recognition from the University of London were consistently rebutted. Thus, despite the epidemic of shell shock and other so-called war neuroses, psychotherapy remained a marginal activity during the 1920s and 1930s.