ABSTRACT
THIS MAY seem an unprofitable subject to review at the present time. There has been no marked increase in our knowledge of it in recent years, and indeed much of what can be found on the subject in current textbooks had already been fully stated and closely discussed in the first two decades of the century—a period during which Janet’s monumental work on Obsessions and Psychasthenia appeared, as well as the detailed studies by Friedmann, Löwenfeld and Bumke: Freud, Abraham and Jones also put forward at that time their views of the varieties and mechanisms of obsessional neurosis. The clinical phenomena have been well recognized and described for over half a century, and little new information has accumulated in recent years regarding the treatment and course of the illness.
