You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I think very few physicians have seriously used psychoanalytic methods in treating the essential neuroses without sooner or later making an attempt to employ the same method in the borderland neuroses and psychoses, with varying results. Some seven years ago I undertook to treat my first series of periodic depressions by psychoanalytic methods, and in spite of the great difficulty of using such a method, I achieved considerable success then as well as later. At another time I shall report in detail some of the case material, but at present it is my purpose only to comment in a more or less desultory manner upon my experience in this and kindred fields not ordinarily classed as belonging to the analytic type of psycho-neuroses.
Including my second series now under study and treatment, the number of manic-depressive cases amounts to seven. In all I found it of greatest advantage to go carefully over the conscious and fore-conscious settings of the patient's difficulties, especially those which seemed to act as precipitating causes to their periodic depressions. Then, and not until then, did I take up a strictly psychoanalytic approach. I soon found that the dream productions of such patients were for the most part engrossed in quite adult settings and were not even so latently obviously sexual in interpretation as in the essential neuroses. I further found that analysis in the depressive cases could not be pushed to a finality so rapidly or completely as in the hysteric neuroses and that one had, as it were, to distil the psychoanalytic interpretation of the dream productions for the patient and ask the patient to analyze further memories of actual experiences in accord with the analytic trends disclosed. I made