Perhaps in view of our previous discussions you would like to know what present-day psychiatry has to offer concerning the obsessional neurosis; it is but a miserable contribution, however. Psychiatry has given names to the various compulsions; and has nothing more to say about them. It asserts instead that persons exhibiting these symptoms are “degenerate.” That is not much satisfaction to us; it is no more than an estimate of their value, a condemnation instead of an explanation. We are intended, I suppose, to conclude that deterioration from type would naturally produce all kinds of oddities in people. Now, we do believe that people who develop such symptoms must be somewhat different in type from other human beings; but we should like to know whether they are more “degenerate” than other nervous patients, than hysterical or insane people. The characterization is clearly again much too general. One may even doubt whether it is justified at all when one learns that such symptoms occur in men and women of exceptional ability who have left their mark on their generation. Thanks to their own discretion and the untruthfulness of biographers we usually learn very little of an intimate nature about our exemplary great men; but it does happen occasionally that one of them is a fanatic about truth like Émile Zola,[46] and then we hear of the many extraordinary obsessive habits from which he suffered throughout life. Psychiatry has got out of this difficulty by dubbing these people “_dégénerés superieurs_.” Very well; but psycho-analysis has shown that these extraordinary obsessional symptoms can be removed permanently, like the symptoms of other diseases, and as in other people who are not degenerate. I myself have frequently succeeded in doing so. I shall only give you two examples of analysis of obsessional symptoms; one is an old one, but I have never found a better; and one is a recent one. I shall limit myself to these two because an account of this kind must be very explicit and go into great detail.