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PERCEPTION OF SYMPTOMS and inquiry into their origins and functions became important very early in the history of psychoanalysis, going as far back as Breuer's and Freud's 1893–1895 Studies on Hysteria. Only recently has it been recognized, however, that becoming free of symptoms is not the same as changing psychologically. Psychoanalytic patients, today, who appear far less inhibited about adjustive sexual functions than the early id patients and far less insecure about adaptive social functions than the later ego-interpersonal patients, seem to suffer much less from unsatisfied biological needs and failed social securities than from blocked strivings for psychic freedom and personal fufillment.
It is not necessary, of course, to infer increased id satisfaction and ego-interpersonal security from decreased psychoanalytic study of them. It is possible to infer instead, for example, that id frustrations and ego-interpersonal insecurities are nothing more than symptoms that patients resolve without reporting or, perhaps more simply, that psychoanalysts no longer treat the frustrated and insecure. I tend to discount both these possible inferences and favor a third, namely that sexual satisfaction and social security no longer dominate pursuits of certain sectors of the culture at large as a result, among other things, of the wide dissemination of Freud's and Sullivan's classic findings on hysterias and obsessions beyond psychopathology into child and educational psychology, sociology and political theory, art and literature and, in important ways, even into pop culture. Whatever