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In an earlier issue of the PSYCHOANALYTIC REVIEW I offered to our readers a study made for me by one of my patients in regard to some of her phobias and compulsions. She had made at that time a comparative study of these in the light of similar notions recorded in the beliefs and customs of primitive and savage peoples. This study had helped her largely in understanding the reason for the presence of these things in her mental life, their historical significance not only but also the incompatibility of them in such form with the plane of modern culture in which her lot was cast. Recently she has communicated with me to the effect that she would like to present a sequel to this report of herself contained in the former study. She wished to show from her own experience that psychoanalysis has a practical bearing upon life and that the effecting of its practical aim does actually lie in its investigation into the varying grades of culture which lie behind and within the life of the individual as well as of the community. This patient believes that through these means she discovered her health and with it unsuspected and inexhaustible powers. She wishes to add her testimony, out of a number of years of successful experience to the effectiveness of psychoanalysis and the truth of its method in recognizing the undying value of the past in the life and the actual relation of primitive with modern culture. Again I will leave the telling of her story entirely in her own hands.
It is now five years or more since I was allowed to present to the readers of the PSYCHOANALYTIC REVIEW some of the facts of the psychoneurosis from which I had just begun my recovery through psychoanalysis. I made the study at that time in order to compare those features of my illness with features of the same sort which are consciously and conspicuously active in primitive society. My attempt was to set forth in some measure the meaning and value of such a comparison for the understanding of such ment