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Most of the interest of psycho-analysts has in recent years been devoted to the application of psycho-analysis beyond the area of psycho-neurosis, and most of the discussions in our international or regional meetings have dealt with one aspect or another of what our late friend Ernst Kris termed the 'widening scope of psycho-analysis'. Our home base is, of course, the field in which and for which psycho-analysis first came into being and with which we are still most familiar, viz. the psychoneuroses.
Of the psychoneuroses we know, first of all, that they are illnesses, both from a subjective and an objective point of view; subjectively, because those afflicted with neurosis suffer, and objectively, because psychoneurosis interferes with mental functioning, and hence diminishes an individual's survival chances, a fact which is easily overlooked in soft times when even the handicapped can prosper, but becomes apparent in times of great stress. Secondly, we understand the psychodynamics of the neuroses; we know that they are due to inner conflicts which have not been solved in favour of one or the other of the contending forces or through a compromise, but have been swept under the carpet, as it were, through repression (or processes involving repression) and to a return of the repressed in distorted form. Finally, we know that the psycho-analytic treatment which consists of undoing repressions and returning the repressed to consciousness, i.e. the restoration of interrupted internal communications, is in otherwise reasonably well-adjusted people with a fair frustration tolerance not only one therapy among many but the causal therapy of neuroses.
But when we leave the field of psychoneurosis and deal with other psychiatric conditions, such as delinquencies, psychopathies, and the so-called character neuroses and behaviour disorders, not to mention the psychoses, things are no longer so clear. In some instances, such as, i.e. in some forms of delinquency, it is no lon