[Participating therapy of a compulsive neurosis. The history of a monastery student]

The case represented above reminds the description of Freud concerning the special relationship in obsessive neurosis to the theme of death, i.e. that these patients find a constant preoccupation in reflecting over the duration of life as well as of the possibility of death of those who are in close relationship to them. Furthermore, the world in which our patient lives, has the quality of threatening and rejecting ("Drohung und Abstossung") described by von Gebsattel in his study on the phenomenology of the obsessional.--The young special-school teacher who was 24 years old in the beginning of the therapy, suffered not only from depression, but from obsessions in thinking certain thoughts, and compulsions, mainly controls. The facts in his fate: early death of the mother, sickness of the father, a congenital abnormity of one eye which demanded several operations, and, last not least, school-years passed in a college of Benedictine monchs, created the roots of his neurosis. And when, in the age of 20 years, he fell in love with a girl, he had to discover that she was suffering from Hodgkin disease, which put him in the dilemma whether to stay with her or to seperate. In this situation he asked for therapeutic help which proceedings were reflected in a rich material of dreams.