ABSTRACT
The attitude of psychiatrists to psycho-analysis is anything but uniform. Psychiatry could not possibly limit itself to psycho-analysis, but neither need it be, as is not seldom the case, hostile to it. The traditional psychiatric approach is one of primary emphasis on the organism; the psychodynamic approach is that of primary emphasis on the person who has an organic but also other aspects. Mayer-Gross, Slater and Roth state explicitly that they seek to base psychiatry on the ground of the natural sciences. Sigmund Freud's education and thinking for the first thirty-five years of his life placed him on the same fundamental ground as Mayer-Gross, Slater and Roth, the ground of an organic rather than a personal point of view. The tendency to exaggerate the importance of heredity and undervalue both the psychological and physical aspects of environment in the development of personality and mental illness is apparent throughout the work.
