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I WELCOME MY PARTICIPATION IN THIS SYMPOSIUM AND EXPECTED that it would be a straightforward task to compare the analysts' present ideas about the infantile neurosis with those which were formulated half a century ago.
Nevertheless, when I began to approach the subject more closely, I began to be doubtful about its legitimacy and appropriateness. I felt that I was setting out to compare two sets of propositions which had arisen on different grounds, fitted into different
conceptions, and, in short, had not enough in common to be treated as if they were on a par.
I assume that we take the case histories of Little Hans (1909) and the Wolf Man (1918) as outstanding examples of infantile neuroses, and the discussion of the processes involved in their disturbances as evidence of the then-reigning conceptions concerning this pathological manifestation.
When doing so, I suggest that we do not neglect in our evaluation one overridingly important difference between past and present. Psychoanalysis, at that period, was not concerned with infantile psychopathology as such. Interest and study were concentrated on the neuroses of adult life, their genesis, their dynamics, their relationship to normal character formation, their difference from the psychoses, etc. Infantile neurosis came within the focus of this interest only since it was one of the new findings, made by means of the new techniqu