Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE TRUE NEUROSES A. Neurasthenia: Clinical Picture; Etiology; Prophylaxis and Therapy. B. Anxiety-Neurosis: Symptomatology ; Etiology; Theory. C, Refutation of the Objections to the Sexual Etiology of the True Neuroses. A. True Neurasthenia As already related, while Freud was following the causative sexual injuries in detail, he succeeded in showing that neurasthenia as it had been described by the earlier authors resolved itself into two typical clinical pictures: into so-called "true neurasthenia" and into anxiety-neurosis, which forms not only have a specific etiology but can also be sharply differentiated clinically. Under neurasthenia, Freud understands those frequent symptom-complexes of pressure in the head, spinal irritation, dyspepsia with flatulency and constipation, paresthesias, diminished potency, as well as a prevailing emotional depression. According to Freud's views, this clinical picture corresponds to the specific cause of excessive masturbation or frequent pollutions or better expressed; neurasthenia may in every case betraced back to a condition of the nervous system which has been acquired through excessive masturbation or arisen spontaneously from frequent pollutions.i This picture of neurasthenia is a fairly uniform one, hence the various pseudo- neurasthenias (as the nervous disturbances of cachexia and arterio-sclerosis, the early conditions of progressive paralysis and of many of the the psychoses, etc.) may be more sharply differentiated from true neurasthenia than formerly. Further, according to Moebius's proposal many a status nervosi of hereditary degenerates can be placed at one side and one will also find reasons for classifying many neuroses which are to-day called neurasthenia, especially those of intermittent or periodical...