Reflections on the idea of personal fate and its psychopathology: Helene Deutsch's "Hysterical Fate Neurosis" revisited.
The idea of a psychopathology of fate or what had come to be called a fate neurosis has failed to retain any established place in the structure of psychoanalytic thought. The clinical observations and theoretical formulations, to which the idea of a fate neurosis answered, have been subsumed in the course of things by more fundamental and systematic conceptualizations. A review of Helene Deutsch's (1930) paper, "Hysterical Fate Neurosis," is therefore bound to be largely an excursion into an area of intellectual history. However, such history never fails to shed light on certain ongoing clinical and theoretical problems that may have lost too much to current developments in psychoanalytic thought. It is with this historical purpose that the present study of Deutsch's classic paper on a fate neurosis is undertaken.
D000184:Acting Out; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006167:Guilt; D006801:Humans; D009497:Neurotic Disorders / Q000523:psychology* / Q000628:therapy; D009769:Object Attachment; D009813:Oedipus Complex; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy