ABSTRACT
Prologue: With so many doctors away in H.M. Forces during 1939-45 those left to do civilian duties in hospitals, clinics and private practices found themselves over-burdened with a press of patients, and, in the psychotherapeutic field, with ever-lengthening waiting lists of sufferers impatiently hoping to begin treatment before their nervous breakdown was complete. So much was this the case that one of the hospitals at which I worked made a definite ruling that only such patients as one could reasonably hope to cure by a short course of psychotherapy were to be considered for treatment. Accordingly I adapted myself to that attitude and in certain instances sacrificed the ambition of thoroughness and completeness in favour of the time-saving attempt to deal with symptom analysis only, avoiding those paths which lead to the deeper levels of the psyche in which nevertheless still lies the nucleus of every neurosis.
