Description
In his preface, the author describes this book, containing the 1943 Salmon Lectures, as his psychiatric biography, not a compendium of Freud’s work but rather a résumé of the author’s own experiences in relation to the development of psychoanalysis. The following topics are discussed: descriptive and interpretive psychiatry; Breuer’s cathartic method, the precursor of psychoanalysis; the sexual etiology of the neuroses; Freud’s classification of the neuroses; the Zurich school and psychoanalysis; paranoia and its relation to homosexuality; polymorphous perversities in paranoid states; determination of the selection of neuroses; the struggle of the psychic forces in the neuroses; mourning, melancholia, and compulsions; psychoanalysis, art, and religion; religion and traumatic neurosis; repetition compulsion; consciousness and instinct; and the paleopsychologist of the mind.
