ABSTRACT
The most important work of Otto Fenichel (1898-1946), a German psychoanalyst who went into exile to America, is The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neuroses. In his so-called bible of the neuroses Fenichel, who was known as an analyst who (still) referred to S. Freud, devotes a surprisingly small number of pages to hysteria, which was, after all, the cradle of Freudian psychoanalysis. Notions such as ego-strength and self-consciousness apply as basic concepts of this type of psychoanalysis, which also presses ahead in the other departments of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Lacanian psychoanalysis acknowledges the prevalence of psychotic phenomena in hysteria, notably a type of hysteria which may display psychotic features, but hardly pays it any specific attention. American Postfreudian psychoanalysis becomes a psychology of the ego. In Postfreudian circles there has been a marked tendency to emphasize the curability of schizophrenia and the unanalyzability of hysteria.
