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.
The further our exposition takes us from the topic of hysteria, the less definite becomes our theoretical psychoanalytical knowledge. The theory of hysteria is corroborated daily by our clinical experience and represents a well rounded whole. On the other hand, in the theory of compulsion neuroses, there are a number of large gaps which remain to be filled by future investigations. A coherent conception of perversions will be possible only after we have formed a hypothesis that can be substantiated empirically. The two remaining provinces, psychoanalytical psychiatry and characterology, are the most recent fields of psychoanalytic study. Their exploitation is only beginning; they provide a plethora of challenging problems, yet for the time being only the naked framework of a theory can be considered as securely grounded.
The relations of psychiatry and psychoanalysis have been discussed so frequently and so adequately that they need not detain us here.1 Suffice it to say that a psychoanalytical theory of psychoses by no means implies that psychiatric research is superfluous. The aim of such an analytic theory is only to supplement psychiatric knowledge at certain essential points. Regardless of such a theory, there remains the field of somatic problems, which cannot be attacked by psychoanalysis, and on the psychological side, the purely descriptive studies. Moreover,