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Already in the collective report written in the year 1927 I have pointed to the enormous number of works on compulsion,1 the special domain of psychopathology. But since that time the literature on this topic has been considerably enriched especially by the works of W. STEKEL: “Compulsion and Doubt,” consisting of two volumes,2 and the works discussing the connections between postencephalitic and compulsive manifestations. The fifth congress for psychotherapeutics chose the compulsive disease as the chief subject for discussions on two subsequent days. The analyst STEKEL, the clinical physician HOFFMANN and the investigator of heredity LUXEMBURGER have given the chief reports and a group of psychotherapists have discussed compulsion from every point of view.3 But there are still many problems uncleared. That may not so much depend upon the futile endeavors of the authors as on the inexhaustibility of the symptomatologic and characterologic possibilities of compulsion.
In analytic respect the importance of the sadistic instinct-components within the genesis of the compulsions was postulated. Thus FREUD has made anal sadism theoretically responsible for the development of compulsive reactions, while STEKEL obtained a similar conception of the formations of symptoms of psychic compulsion in another, i.e., the practical way, and emphasizes above all the criminal factor within sadistic impulse. The fear of the outburst of the forbidden instincts seems to be the impulsive element of the ceremonial laws and interdicts, which enforce themselves compulsively; the distinct relation compulsive patients have to the so-called death-complex, equally point to the same direction. SCHULTZ-HENKE tries4