Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/69

 BOOK REVIEWS fii '

To begin with, Dr. Kempf appears to be convinced of the essentially \

sexual nature of neurotic suffering. He writes, for instance: 'Wherever '

we have an individual, male or female, who is conscientiously absorbed

in striving to suppress the sexual functions from making him or her i

aware of their conditioned needs, we have a neurotic individual as the '*

result' (p. 88), and, again: 'No individual can have a psychosis or anxiety neurosis so long as he can maintain his sexual potency without

jeopardizing his needs for social esteem' (p. 709), The conception of '

conflict is equally fundamental. One passage (p. 28) gives the im- *

pression that this conflict is between different autonomic segments, but '' '

this is doubtless a misunderstanding on the reviewer's part, for else- where (e.g., p. 20) Dr. Kempf speaks of 'uncontrollable autonomic affective cravings originating in autonomic segments opposed by the ego'; for him, symptoms 'gratify autonomic cravings that cannot be gratified by external realities because social conventions and obligations force the e^o to prevent the autonomic cravings from acquiring the external stimuli which they are conditioned to need' (p. 64). ^

We fancy, however, that this last statement must have been care- lessly formulated, since it does not appear to represent Dr. Kempf's true position. We take this to be one between Freud's and Adler's, though nearer to the latter's; it would seem to be Freudian as to the aetiology of the neuroses, but Adierian as to their mechanism. It will be remembered that, schematically put, Freud considers symptoms to be a compromise-formation contributed to equally by the ego and the sexual instincts in opposition to each other, while Adier holds that they are created by the ego instincts alone as a compensation for a real or imagined inferiority (which he first thought was always a sexual one). Now, so far as we can judge. Dr. Kempf holds, with Adler, that symptoms are created by the ego as a compensation for some secret, real or imaginary, inferiority, but, approximating a little to Freud, he finds that this inferiority is practically always of a sexual nature. ' Compensation is one of the most fundamental attributes of living tissue and occurs particularly where there exists some sort of painful irritation or the tendency of the autonomic-affective apparatus to be forced into the fear state ' (p. 69). The commonest inferiorities leading to patho- logical compensations are 'segmental cravings for masturbation and homosexual and heterosexual perversions' (p. 71). The course of events is, according to him, as follows : when a person is not sexually potent in the full adult sense (genital heterosexuality) the feeUng of biological and social inferiority engenders anxiety, and the symptoms result from the compensatory efforts on the part of the ego to escape from this fear. The conception of impotency and castration as the main source of inferiority dominate the book, the criterion being taken very much from an adult point of view, estimated, that is, by racial and social