You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Psycho-analytical studies of schizophrenia have hitherto been made upon advanced stages of the disease.2 These have led to considerable comprehension of the formation and meaning of late symptoms and reaction-formations, but have helped very little to clarify the etiology, in so far as it is psychogenic. Reported analyses of the early regressive and disintegrating processes—studies made while the conflict is still raging and before a completely narcissistic solution has been accepted—are rare. Yet psycho-analytic study of such cases, or of non-psychotic 'schizoid' personalities, should vastly extend our knowledge of normal and morbid autistic processes.
We are, therefore, reporting in more detail than usual what transspired in the analysis of a case whose symptoms are chiefly 'phenomena of a residual nature', representing the survivals of a normal state or of a psychoneurosis, according to Freud's classification of schizophrenic symptoms.2 Symptoms of the second group, the 'morbid process' (detachment of libido from its objects, megalomania, hypochondria, affective disturbance), and of the third, consisting of 'attempts at recovery', do not yet dominate this clinical picture.
We shall first describe the most conspicuous of those mechanisms which are also commonly found in the study of transference neuroses; then we shall also define those features of personality and those symptoms which are characteristic of autistic personalities, and shew how a part of these represent the failure of ego and libido to develop beyond the phallic stage, and a part result from regressions to still more primitive levels of instinct-ego organization. We shall finally