ABSTRACT

Psychiatry is not the only branch of medicine where statistics of “cures” and “failures” are unreliable. In tabulations of cases treated by psychoanalytic methods the number cited is small, and there are so many variant factors entering into the treatment of each one that the crude statistics have little probative force. Psychoanalytic theory might be so formulated as to preclude the logical possibility of negative cases. That it need be so formulated, or that the theory as it is actually used corresponds to such a formulation, is questionable enough to throw the burden of proof upon the critic. Psychoanalysis has infiltrated the field of psychiatry. Medical schools, hospitals, clinics and established institutes for the training of analysts provide opportunities for systematic observation and discussion of neurotic and psychotic patients from the psychoanalytic point of view.