The psychoanalytic theory of neurosis

NEARLY twenty years of teaching at different psychoanalytic institutes and training centers both in Europe and in America—as staff member in five cities and as occasional guest lecturer in ten others—have convinced me of the need to summarize the psychoanalytic doctrines in a systematic and comprehensive manner, and thus to provide teaching aids for psychoanalytic training. Among the different disciplines a textbook of psychoanalysis should embrace, the theory of neurosis interested me in particular. At European psychoanalytic institutes the custom was to subdivide this field into a general part, treating the mechanisms common to all neuroses, and a special part, treating the characteristic features of the individual neuroses. Because chance first brought me to the special part, I published in 1932 *Spezielle Psychoanalytische Neurosenlehre* at the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag in Vienna, Austria. This book was translated by Dr. Bertram D.Lewin and Dr. Gregory Zilboorg, and published in 1934 in the *Psychoanalytic Quarterly* and, as a book, by W.W.Norton and Company, New York, under the title *Outline of Clinical Psychoanalysis*. The lack of a “General Part” was the main drawback of this book. Therefore, when I was asked to prepare a second edition, I preferred to write a new book, which would not only treat the subject matter of the *Outline* in a more systematized and up-to-date form, but the questions of “general” theory as well. [from author's Preface]