Neurotic symptoms then, just like errors and dreams, have their meaning and, like these, are related to the life of the person in whom they appear. This is an important matter which I should like to demonstrate to you by some examples. I can merely assert, I cannot prove, that it is so in every case; anyone observing for himself will be convinced of it. For certain reasons though, I shall not take these examples from cases of hysteria, but from another very remarkable form of neurosis, closely allied in origin to the latter, about which I must say a few preliminary words. This, which we call _the obsessional neurosis_, is not so popular as the widely-known _hysteria_; it is, if I may so express myself, not so noisily ostentatious, behaves more as if it were a private affair of the patient’s, dispenses almost entirely with bodily manifestations and creates all its symptoms in the mental sphere. The obsessional neurosis and hysteria are the two forms of neurotic disease upon the study of which psycho-analysis was first built up, and in the treatment of which also our therapy celebrates its triumphs. In the obsessional neurosis, however, that mysterious leap from the mental to the physical is absent, and it has really become more intimately comprehensible and transparent to us through psycho-analytic research than hysteria; we have come to understand that it displays far more markedly certain extreme features of the neurotic constitution. The obsessional neurosis[45] takes this form: the patient’s mind is occupied with thoughts that do not really interest him, he feels impulses which seem alien to him, and he is impelled to perform actions which not only afford him no pleasure but from which he is powerless to desist. The thoughts (obsessions) may be meaningless in themselves or only of no interest to the patient; they are often absolutely silly; in every case they are the starting-point of a strained concentration of thought which exhausts the patient and to which he yields most unwillingly. Against his will he has to worry and speculate as if it were a matter of life or death to him. The impulses which he perceives within him may seem to be of an equally childish and meaningless character; mostly, however, they consist of something terrifying, such as temptations to commit serious crimes, so that the patient not only repudiates them as alien, but flees from them in horror, and guards himself by prohibitions, precautions, and restrictions against the possibility of carrying them out. As a matter of fact he never, literally not even once, carries these impulses into effect; flight and precautions invariably win. What he does really commit are very harmless, certainly trivial acts—what are termed the obsessive actions—which are mostly repetitions and ceremonial elaborations of ordinary everyday performances, making these common necessary actions—going to bed, washing, dressing, going for walks, etc.—into