Recall the compulsive act of our first patient. The woman longs for her intensely beloved husband, with whom she cannot share her life because of his shortcoming and weaknesses. She feels she must remain true to him, she can give his place to no one else. Her compulsive symptom affords her that for which she pines, ennobles her husband, denies and corrects his weaknesses,--above all, his impotence. This symptom is fundamentally a wish-fulfillment, exactly as is a dream; moreover, it is what a dream not always is, an erotic wish-fulfillment. In the case of our second patient you can see that one of the component purposes of her ceremonial was the prevention of the intercourse of her parents or the hindrance of the creation of a new child thereby. You have perhaps also guessed that essentially she strove to put herself in the place of her mother. Here again we find the removal of disturbances to sexual satisfaction and the fulfillment of personal sexual wishes. We shall soon turn to the complications of whose existence we have given you several indications.
I do not want to make reservations as to the universal applicability of these declarations later on, and therefore I wish to call to your attention the fact that everything that I say here about suppression, symptom-development and symptom-interpretation has been learned from three types of neuroses--anxiety-hysteria, conversion-hysteria, and compulsion-neuroses--and for the time being is relevant to these forms only. These three conditions, which we are in the habit of combining into one group under the name of "_transference neuroses_," also limit the field open to psychoanalytic therapy. The other neuroses have not been nearly so well studied by psychoanalysis,--in one group, in fact, the impossibility of therapeutic influence has been the reason for the neglect. But you must not forget that psychoanalysis is still a very young science, that it demands much time and care in preparation for it, that not long ago it was still in the cradle, so to speak. Yet at all points we are about to penetrate into the understanding of those other conditions which are not transference neuroses. I hope I shall still be able to speak to you of the developments that our assumptions and results have undergone by being correlated with this new material, and to show you that these further studies have not led to contradictions but rather to the production of still greater uniformity. Granted that everything, then, that has been said here, holds good for the three transference neuroses, allow me to add a new bit of information to the evaluation of its symptoms. A comparative investigation into the causes of the disease discloses a result that may be confined into the formula: in some way or other these patients fell ill through _self-denial_ when reality withheld from them the satisfaction of their sexual wishes. You recognize how excellently well these two results are found to agree. The symptoms must be understood, then, as a substitute satisfaction for that which is missed in life.