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This volume is composed of a series of twelve lectures originally published in German in 1932. The subject matter is presented in two parts, the first dealing- with organ neuroses, which includes chapters on the “Vegetative Vital Cycle of Nutrition,” the “Animal Vital Cycle of the Circulation,” the “Pneumatic Vital Cycle of the Respiration,” the “Mental Vital Cycle,” and on “Autosuggestion and Abreaction,” and the second with methods of psychotherapy, which are presented in chapters on “Attraction Force of the Unconscious,” “Sexual Analysis,” Individual Psychology, and Jung's Analytical Psychology.
In the lectures on “organ neuroses,” the term is used to indicate the psychogenic situations in which the manifest symptoms are those of impairment of the bodily functions, a combination in which the author regards the “mind “and “body “as merely two phenomenal forms of one and the same “life,” in contrast to the theories of psychophysical parallelism and reciprocal action. He develops in an interesting and instructive way the manner in which the four (nutritional, circulatory, pneumatic, mental) psychophysical “cycles” or “spheres” disclose themselves as they progress from the “primitive to increasingly differentiated phases and forms.” “From whatever aspect we study life—in war-time, in economic struggles, and in the world of sex—it becomes plain to us how indispensable is a deliberate adjustment between the conscious and the beast in man. No one can live unless first of all he is an animal; and yet everyone is in danger of being devoured by the animal within him, or, psychologically, of identifying himself with the inner beast.”
In the part devoted to analytical methods the author asserts that “fixation in systematized abstractions is a typical malady of psychoanalysts” whom he accuses of the tendency to see penis or vagina, inferiority complex or will to power, and extroversion or introversion phenomena in everything- encountered. He advises the young or would-be analys