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.
This book is a translation of the German original which was published in 1938 in Berne, Switzerland, and which was reviewed in this QUARTERLY, Vol. VIII, No. 4, 1939. It is a literal translation from the German and nothing new about the text proper can be added. But the English edition is provided with a glossary. A publisher's note on the jacket draws attention to the glossary referring to '… the author's special uses of the more familiar medical terms, and … his valuable neologisms, which will hardly be found in the latest medical dictionaries'.
This glossary is interesting in many respects. There are many borrowed terms for which Stekel claims authorship. Theodore Reik's 'surprise' is launched by Stekel under the flag of 'analytical experience'; Laforgue's 'scotoma' is taken over unchanged without mentioning Laforgue. He does give credit for having coined the terms 'functional dream' and 'functional symbol' to Silberer, but Silberer is dead.
Other concepts Stekel appropriates but rechristens: 'organ speech of the mind' or 'somatization' are used for conversion; 'parapathy' stands for neurosis; a 'subjective-parapath' is what we call a narcissistic neurotic; psychosis is rechristened 'paralogia'; overdetermination gets from Stekel the colorful name 'polyphony of thought-processes'.
There are redefinitions of freudian concepts which would be amusing if they were not so deplorable. Thus we find under 'id' in the glossary the following: '… for Freudians, a quasi-impersonation of the unconscious Ego'. For Stekel who does not generalize the importance of the unconscious as does Freud, it is 'a quasi-impersonation of the pre-conscious Ego'.
That Stekel is not a logical thinker is proved by his definition of scotomization: '… mental blindness to what is going on within one's own psyche, identical with what the Freudians call repression'. It