Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse

Rǒle of the Unconscious in the Neurosis. Dr. Alfred Adles.

Terminations of Psychoanalytic Treatments. Dr. W. Stekel.

Changes in the Freudian School. Dr. C. Forthüller.

Concerning the Psychogenesis of Bronchial Asthma. Dr. M. Wulff.

Rǒle of the Unconscious in the Neurosis.—Adler points out that neurotic patients utilize the unconscious to retain their nervous symptoms and pleasures by displacing the goal of their desires into the unconscious. He gives several illustrations of this phenomenon from his practice and derives the formula: “we may consider the neurotic act as belonging to a goal in consciousness. And we may assert as provisionally determined: the unconsciousness of a fiction, of a moralizing experience or of a memory, comes about as an artifice of the mind when the feeling of personality and the unity of the personality would be threatened if this became conscious.”

Terminations of Psychoanalytic Treatments.—In an article which is full of practical hints for the practicing psychoanalyst, Stekel details from his own experience many of the difficulties which endanger the satisfactory conclusion of analyses. “Every neurotic guards the secret of his neurosis like a precious jewel, like his Rhine-gold, which he will not allow to be taken from him. If he scents danger for his artistic fiction, he attempts to flee; one says he is cured, another, that he must go on a journey, a third, that the treatment excites him too much, he must get quiet. The variations are endless.” Stekel emphasizes the fact that every case must be approached with great care and skepticism. He warns against giving the patients solutions of their symptoms during the early days of the treatment as this merely repels them and does not help their assimilation of their unconscious. He also agrees with Freud's recommendation not to allow patients to read psychoanalytic literature as they merely use what they learn to strengthen their resistances against revealin