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Reports of treatment from psychoanalytic sources presented in statistical form indicate that approximately sixty per cent of all cases were considered recovered or improved. This percentage closely approximates that reported from institutes
where intensive psychoanalysis had not been used. It may well have been an error to report such immensurables as psychoneurotic situations by means of statistics. Strikingly satisfactory results can be obtained by brief treatment conducted on strictly psychoanalytic lines. Two case reports of such short treatment are given. The question arises whether, when there is too great or too deep a preoccupation with the unconscious, this does not retard synthesis between conscience and primitive drives. Lengthy and deep analyses are today most in favor, but there has been no investigation to correlate the permanency and quality of result with the length and/or depth of treatment. The tapering off of treatment appears valuable especially in borderline and psychotic cases. Anxiety neurosis and conversion hysteria react most favorably to psychoanalytic treatment; the intellectual narcissist and the individual who recedes into deep depression or expands into manic hyperactivity when faced with analytic revelations, reacts least favorably. Cases who escape hospitalization because of their analyses far outnumber those who require hospitalization after analysis.
While control of the younger analysts might reveal certain errors due to inexperience, the older analyst should review his analytic cases from time to time with other analysts in order to clarify certain rigid or fixed tendencies which he may have developed. It is hoped that such a technique will shorten analyses which run for two or more years.
Possibly a general overenthusiasm thirty years ago may account for some of the present incertitudes. One of Freud's epigrams seems apt at this moment: 'If we cannot see clearly, let us at least see what is unclear clearly'.