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This volume is a systematic presentation of the psychologic aspects of various female disorders, with the possible psychotherapeutic modifications. In the introductory part, the author outlines the situation as follows: At the beginning of the operating era, gynecologists were occupied with the hope that the psychoneuroses of women might be prevented or cured by surgical measures on the genital organs. This attitude was based on the ideas of the ancients who referred all forms of psychic illness in women to pathologic changes in the womb. The first large series of these operations seemed to show the correctness of this supposition, and they caused the psychiatrist, Bossi, to propose that all institutions treating nervous and mental troubles in women be turned over to the gynecologists.
Soon, however, both psychiatrists and gynecologists realized that they had been too optimistic; as they discovered that the cures, due as much to the suggestibility of the patients as to the physical treatment, lasted too short a time, and that the symptoms either returned or were replaced by others even more severe in type. When this error was realized, a compensatory mistake was made in the opposite direction by separating these basically closely related divisions of therapy. This unsuccessful attempt to approach the treatment of two related fields from the same point drove gynecology and psychiatry apart, and only more recent great changes in social and scientific fields demand the synthesis to which the details of the present book are devoted.
In the meantime neither psychiatrists nor gynecologists were concerned very actively with the therapy of female psychoneuroses; the former were in the more descriptive phases of their interests and the latter were confined to their own operative field. Lately, Kogerer, the Vienna psychiatrist, has pointed out the problems and the needs in this great zone where psychoneuroses and genital troubles are combined, and which is in sore need of atten