ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud (1856±1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, also contributed highly signi®cantly to our psychodynamic understanding of schizophrenia. This came about even if Freud's experience of psychotic patients was not extensive. He did not work in psychiatric hospitals and the classical psychoanalytic method that he developed and to which he was committed was not applicable to the treatment of psychoses in the way it was to neuroses. Freud's actual experience of psychosis psychotherapy remained scanty, and, together with his theoretical inferences, this is an important reason why his in¯uence on the psychoanalytic approach to schizophrenic psychoses became two-edged.
