Clinical experience with patients who decompensate in the course of psychoanalytic treatment points up a wide variety of symptoms closely associated with a loss of internal object representation and a variety of urgent restitutional efforts. These re-enforce Freud's thesis that schizophrenia is to be sharply differentiated from neurosis, with loss of object representation

in the former and retention of such representations in the unconscious in the latter. These concepts clearly suggest specific technical approaches in the treatment of schizophrenic patients. They also raise the general question as to whether there is value in differentiating more sharply between conflict disorders and deficiency disorders.