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This new work of Dr. Stekel's, subtitled An epitomization of his 30 years’ experience, fills 317 octavo pages in 23 chapters, without index. It is a readable and excellent concentrate of this experience, taking up successively the introductions to therapy, its beginning, the work of exploration, and then what follows. Then the warning re suicide, and therapeutic suggestions for borderline cases, such as undeveloped schizophrenics, or even paretics who come with earlier diagnoses of “neurasthenia,” or “hysteria” from even some psychiaters.
Transference, its forms, positive and negative, its handling and its dangers are well outlined in their respective chapters. The family situation and the necessity for ruling out all family intermingling is emphasized.
In the chapter on character and psychotherapy open and closed types are accented and the respective forms of resistance outlined. Extra-version and introversion are universally mixed and the author prefers the Kretschmer type formulations to those of Jung.
The significance of dreams for psychoanalysis chapter reemphasizes their importance and the author's own earlier contributions. The failure of memory of the dream as a resistance phenomenon is discussed. Analysis without dreams is possible only for actual conscious conflicts. Sleep disturbances are also here touched upon. Too strict formulation re “dreaming” here is to be avoided. Of the helps to therapy Stekel mentions diaries, poems, dramas, etc., and advises the would-be analyst to have a wide range of literary interest since so many patients will use fragments in their dream life.
Child analysis, day dream analysis, psychoanalysis as a compulsion neurosis, diseases of conscious, analysis of pain at the end of the treatment, these chapters terminate the book.
Dr. Stekel naturally holds to his own particular phraseology. He likes the Greek. Paraneurotics, psychoneurotics, psychopaths are all “parapaths.” Such a general term has its advantages in a field which is still