by Thomas M. French, M.D.

Franz Alexander is an investigator who has been extremely fertile
both in ideas and in projects for testing them. He is ideally suited for
the task which has been one of the main objectives of his scientific
career--to bring psychoanalysis out of its early isolation. During the
last fifty years, a gradual narrowing of the gap between psychoanalysis
and other streams of scientific inquiry has occurred. Alexander has been
one of those who have contributed most to this change.

Alexander is the author of many books in which he has outlined
successively the main streams underlying his scientific thinking. A selec-
tion even from the best of his shorter writings must remain fragmentary
for those who are not familiar with his longer works. In this introduc-
tion, accordingly, I shall try to survey the development of his ideas in
historical perspective.

One of Alexander's earliest papers, "The Castration Complex in the
Formation of Character," published in 1923, ushered in a first phase in
his scientific development. This phase was inspired by Freud's recently
published observations on the role of an "unconscious sense of guilt"
and "need for punishment" in the genesis both of neuroses and of cer-
tain character types. ¹ In the paper mentioned above, Alexander
reported a detailed analysis, illustrating the role of such a "need for pun-
ishment" in a patient with a "neurotic character." One of the most im-
portant symptoms of this patient was what Alexander calls a "passive

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