ABSTRACT
Progress in understanding the obsessional neuroses has been considerably hampered by the very natural tendency of the clinician to concentrate his energies on characteristic clinical features of the disease. The obsessional neurosis is indeed the most elastic of all neuroses. And it is well that it should be so. For the task of the obsessional neurosis is an important and difficult one. It is to permit a regressive flight from the anxieties induced by advancing development, and at the same time to stem that regression. The obsessional neurosis, for example, stimulated by the common factor of castration anxiety, owed its distinctive clinical features partly to constitutional factors, partly to precocious ego-development, to special experience of anal-sadistic ambivalence, to defusion of instinct on frustration, and to a marked quality of regression. This is the supreme virtue of the obsessional technique. Some obsessional neuroses, too, have a melancholic side, whilst in others a schizophrenic layer can be detected.
