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Psychoanalysis is not only a science but to a certain degree also an art and therefore bound to an artistic skill, to a technique. Technique itself, however, even in its highest perfection, is worthless; it can not substitute the art and hardly mediate a picture of it; unsteady and fluctuating are its rules and inquirers trying to give them a constant form realize, as I do, the limits of their undertaking.
The way a physician undertakes to cure a mental disease results from his point of view about the character of the disease. This view, however, is nowadays not a uniform one, as far as the mental sufferings are concerned and hence it is not surprising that several therapeutic approaches are described and many used.
We consider the Neurosis (or as Stekel calls it: “Parapathia “) as a psychic disease based on a conflict between instinct and moral or between the” Id “and the” Super-Ego” (Freud).
As predicated by analysis this conflict is “repressed” from the patient's consciousness and comes to the surface in the form of symptoms.
These fundamental conceptions determine also our analytic method and define essentially the technique we make use of in our treatment.
The basic conception of every Psychoanalysis is superficially similar to the one of the Catholic confession. Two reasons, however, prevent the Catholic clergyman from succeeding in the treatment of psychic disorders. The first one is due to the question of guilt and sin which he will always try to solve from a theological and not from a biological standpoint; the second one is due to the fact that no patient is able to report more than he consciously knows about himself, i.e., to reveal something about his subconscious experiences. The priest therefore does not know where the patient's real trouble lies as he does not know anything about the patient's tendency to