The Group Treatment of Dementia Præcox1

The success of the treatment of many individuals by the psycho-therapeutic method is on so secure a foundation that there is no warranted scepticism of its value. So many cases have been assisted to make a social adjustment that the term cure can be safely applied. The best results of the psychotherapeutic method have been seen in the treatment of the psychoneuroses; but the work of Dr. E. J. Kempf and others at Saint Elizabeth's Hospital and in other places will eventually show that many cases of the more fundamental disturbances of præcox and the manic-depressive groups are also accessible to this method of approach. Many such cases have already been reported.

The individual method has, until recently, been the only one successfully employed. In many cases this is the ideal method, as far as the patient is concerned. But it must be frankly admitted that it has many unfavorable features. First, many cases have been assumed or proved by trial to be inaccessible. In many other cases a transfer could not be obtained. Again the submissive homo-erotic fears the analyst as soon as the sexual material is approached, assuming that the analyst is making a homo-sexual aggression, and recoiling from him with an accentuated fear reaction. Perhaps the most unfortunate obstacle is the economic one, in that, on account of the great amount of time consumed, only a small number of patients can be seen. This latter feature precludes any attempt to assist that large number of persons whose economic value to the community before the onset of the psychosis was not considerable, and also those whose meager education gives but little hope of adding a valuable citizen to the community, such as the morons and defectives.

All these reasons and others that might be mentioned show the need of some method of attacking this problem on a wider basis, in a more wholesale manner. After giving individual talks to a number of patients one at a time and watching the results,