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Schilder calls all neuroses in the course of which anxiety develops 'anxiety neuroses'. He is of the opinion that these neuroses should be subdivided according to the quality and structure of their aggression. He distinguishes three groups. In the first group, the aggression is directed against the object as a whole: the patients have death wishes against the objects but no impulse to dismember them. Agoraphobias and neurotic fears of death belong to this category. The hostility is often unconscious; pregenital tendencies are in the background. The aim of the hostility of the second group is the dismemberment of the object: the fear of being dismembered governs the picture; pregenital sexuality is more outspoken; anxiety symptoms are interwoven with compulsive and obsessive symptoms; disturbances of the sense of space are characteristic. Claustrophobias belong in that group. The third group is entirely governed by motives of dismemberment. There are severe disturbances of equilibrium and sense of space; genitality is abandoned; depressive features complicate the clinical picture.
Schilder illustrates the three groups with interesting case histories of eleven patients. From the psychoanalytic-genetic standpoint, a further elaboration of these case histories would perhaps have been desirable, but descriptively they illustrate very well what he had in mind with his 'types'. Schilder's stressing of the connections not only between anxiety and aggression, but also between anxiety and the senses of space and equilibrium, is especially important and interesting.