ABSTRACT
Neurosis is a set of defensive techniques against basic anxieties. These techniques are the most successful and the closest to normality. The chapter suggests that the genesis of neurosis and psychosis involves a plurality of causes, an etiological equation composed of various terms that articulate successively and developmentally. It argues that the psychoanalytic theory of neurosis and psychosis does not postulate the psychogenesis of these illnesses, as certain psychiatric literature wrongly states. By highlighting endogenous factors, so-called traditional psychiatrists overlook, among other things, the intensity of the current deprivation or conflict, which affects subjects’ threshold and thus contributes to the multifaceted nature of neurosis and psychosis. From the vertex of psychiatry, the chapter discusses normal and pathological behavior, thus incorporating another conceptual pair, health and illness. The principles that govern the configuration of both normal and pathological structures are: principle of multicausality, principle of phenomenal plurality, principle of genetic and functional continuity, and principle of structural mobility.
