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THE TERM compulsion neurosis has often been used without sufficient care and discrimination. Kraepelin classified compulsive neuroses with the manic-depressions. Bleuler ascribed them to the schizophrenias. In psychoanalytic literature, however, we find the concept of the compulsive neurosis described as a genuine neurosis. Binder (1936) brought some clarification to the issue of nomenclature when he introduced the concept of compulsive illness.
In the early 1950's, Christian Mueller (1953) re-examined those survivors of a group of patients who, during the preceding twenty years, had been examined and treated for compulsive illnesses in the Psychiatric Clinic and Outpatients' Clinic of the University of Zurich. Of the fifty-seven cases followed, more than fifteen percent had become psychotic. Seven had been diagnosed as schizophrenic (four of these were confined to psychiatric institutions, while the other three were barely able to make a marginal adjustment). Two others had probably also become schizophrenic, and two had become manic-depressive.
Mueller then proceeded to subdivide the sample into a number of different groups of which I shall here mention only three.
1Preponderantly neurotic personalities who display typical