General: Emanuel v. Geijerstam. Über die Psychoanalyse der Züricher Schule. (On the Zurich school of psycho-analysis). Zeitschrift für Psychotherapie und medizinische Psychologie. Band VIII, S. 57.

This is an excellently written and very clear description of the well-known ideas of the Zurich School and may be read with advantage by everyone who has to investigate such problems. Geijerstam is sufficiently critical of the opinions of Jung and Maeder to be enabled to describe more clearly than his masters the development of their theory from that of Freud and by so doing he facilitates our forming our judgment.

According to Jung, we analyse neurotic phantasies; if the patient finds himself in the presence of some difficulty he avoids it instead of struggling against it. He behaves like a child and gets into the mood of obstinacy which he once had, for example, towards his father. In other words, the Oedipus complex becomes acute, the infantile element in the neurotic patient which had never been completely mastered reappears; the primary element of the neurosis is therefore to be found in laziness, indolence, and displeasure in work. But Jung's adversaries, the Freudian school, call special attention to the fact that these general human qualities cannot be the basis of neuroses. On the same ground Jung refuses sexuality as an aetiological factor.

Psycho-analytical investigations have convinced Geijerstam that the nucleus of the problem of the neuroses is of an ethical nature: the patient suffers from an incredible incapacity and unwillingness to see his own ethical lack, his own shrinking from this or that life-task. The Freudian school reproaches Jung with the fact that with him sexuality has not a real but only a symbolic meaning. And justly, for according to Jung, incest is considered to be far less a reality than a regressive phantasy, and the conflicts arising from it are considered to be based upon an 'anatomical maintenance of the infantile attitude' rather than upon real incest wishes. The mind acts in a way as if similar wishes had once existed. At the same time there exists an Oedipus complex of the child as an actual sexual wish.

Stekel says no