Clinical: Edward Glover. 'A Psycho-analytic Approach to the Classification of Mental Disorders.' (With Diagrams.) The Journal of Mental Science, 1932, vol. LXXVIII, p. 819.

There criteria are suggested as a basis for classification of the psychoses: (a) a descriptive clinical standard, (b) a systematic ego standard by which the psychoses can be related to normal development, (c) a qualitative standard or test of reality, which, by virtue of specific relation to the psychoses, will act as a check on the systematic standard and enable the psychoses to be distinguished from normality.

• a.Descriptive terms, 'schizophrenia' or 'dementia praecox', 'paranoia' and 'melancholia' may be borrowed from existing psychiatric terminology to suggest three main divisions varying in depth of regression and degree of impairment of reality sense.

• b.The psychoses represent an extreme example of the attempt to deal with anxiety by distortion of the ego. The ego-organizations of the first five years of life are the ego key patterns. The primitive ego is polynuclear in the sense of a series of comparatively independent organizations (corresponding to the series of relative libidinal primacies). 'The primitive structure of the ego might be figured as a kind of skeletal system. At the beginning is a cluster formation of ego-nuclei converging on a consecutive series, the elements of which show an increasing degree of organization. The cluster and the first few nuclei that follow represent the fixation-points of the psychoses; the last organized nuclei represent the fixation-points of the neuroses.'

• c.Consideration of the nature of 'objects' and of the primitive processes of projection and introjection leads to the conclusion that the