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It is only within the last few years that psychology has been considered as offering any promise of helping to solve the riddle of the psychoses. Until recently, no one had thought to look below the surface of the bizarre mental productions of the insane (delusions, hallucinations, etc.) to see whether these might have any real meaning and all had been content to accept them at their face value as mere crazy jumbles of words and ideas.
It remained for Prof. Sigmund Freud, of Vienna, to point out the way which bids fair to lead to a much more thorough understanding of these disorders and possibly later to distinct therapeutic gains. Freud came upon these new facts in the course of his observation of the mental phenomena of neurotic patients. The first cases of psychoses which he reported were some of chronic paranoia about the year 1895, but his more detailed studies are of much later date. The same applies to most of the articles to which I shall refer in this review, i. e., they fall within the last decade.
Following in the direction which Freud had indicated, Jung and his co-workers at Zurich undertook the elucidation by analysis of the expressions and delusions of certain dementia præcox patients. The brilliant results of their work have been made accessible to English readers by Drs. Brill and Peterson in Monograph No. 3 of the Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series.
It is my purpose in this article to attempt a similar service in regard to the recent work which has been done on paranoia and paranoid conditions, collecting the numerous articles which have appeared, mostly in German, and by condensing and abstracting these, present the material in such a way that the English reading