Revue Française de Psychanalyse

A. Hesnard and R. Laforgue. The Processes of Autopunition in the Psychology of the Neurosis, Psychosis, Crime and General Pathology.

Marie Bonaparte. Infantile Prophylaxis of the Neurosis.

Sophie Morgenstern. Infantile Psychoanalysis and Its Role in Mental Hygiene.

R. DE SAUSSURE. Note on the Plurality of the Super-Ego.

A. HESNARD and R. LAFORGUE. The Processes of Auto-punition in the Psychology of the Neurosis, Psychosis, Crime and General Pathology. —This long report, taken from the history of the neurosis, psychosis, crime and general illness, contributes nothing original or especially profound. It is rather, in the words of the authors, “a balance sheet of our actual knowledge of the subject presented in aspects particularly susceptible of enlightening our French psychoanalytic movement. The greatest part of the article is devoted to the neurosis. Its different aspects, (a) clinical symptoms, (b) habitual behavior, (c) phantasies, especially erotic phantasies (of conscious erotic content), (d) physical symptoms in which the auto-punitive mechanism operates, are enumerated and expounded. Then follows the observation and analysis of a neurosis constructed entirely by an auto-punitive process. This neurosis was at first intermediary between phobia and obsession, but became finally an obsessional anxiety syndrome, with a very serious systemic phobia of filth, then obsessional ceremony of washing the hands and body in the foreground of the clinical picture. It was obvious from the analysis that the patient punished herself in her symptoms, in her phantasies, in her social behavior, and even in her body. The case is analogous in many ways with the one cited by Freud in “The Predisposition to obsessional neurosis.” The authors next give ways, such as neuropathological behavior, hysterical conversion, phobia, and anxiety neurosis, in which this auto-punitive process presents itself in the clinical practice of psychoanalysis, and in conclusion state that it is