Among the many difficulties and opportunities for misunderstanding I should like to adduce one difficulty which is especially characteristic. In an intensive study of Schreber's or any similar case, it will be discovered that these patients are consumed by the desire for a new world-philosophy which may be of the most bizarre kind. Their aim is obviously to create a system such as will help them in the assimilation of unknown psychical phenomena, _i.e._ enable them to adapt their own unconscious to the world. This arrangement produces a subjective system which must be considered as a necessary transition-stage on the path to the adaptation of their personality in regard to the world in general. But the patient remains stationary at this transitory stage and assumes his subjective view is the world's, hence he remains ill. He cannot free himself from his subjectivism and does not find the link to objective thinking, _i.e._ to society. He does not reach the real summit of self-understanding, for he remains with a merely subjective understanding of himself. But a _mere_ subjective understanding is not real and adequate. As Feuerbach says: _Understanding is only real when it is in accord with that of some other rational beings_. Then it becomes objective[212] and the link with life is reached. I am convinced that not a few will raise the objection that in the first place the psychological process of adaptation does not proceed by the method of first creating a world-philosophy; secondly, that it is in itself a sign of unhealthy mental disposition even to make the attempt to adapt oneself by way of a "world-philosophy." Undoubtedly there are innumerable persons who are capable of adaptation without creating any preliminary philosophy. If they ever arrive at any general theory of the world it is always subsequently. But, on the other hand, there are just as many who are only able to adapt themselves by means of a preliminary intellectual formulation. To everything which they do not understand they are unable to adapt themselves. Generally it comes about that they do adapt themselves just in so far as they can grasp the situation intellectually. To this latter group seem to belong all those patients to whom we have been giving our consideration.