ABSTRACT
Psychiatric diagnosis in Freud’s time was no more than classifying people into different diagnostic categories, for instance, the so-called “psychopathic personalities” with hysteric, perverse, criminal, or addictive traits, the psychoses and neurasthenia. Today, diagnostic systems in psychiatry are much more refined, operationalised, and validated than they were at the turn of the twentieth century. Psychoanalytical psychotherapy aims to help the patient to better understand and accept himself, to realise his emotional conflicts and to develop more adequate solutions for them. In the development of psychoanalysis, authors may distinguish first Freud’s three models of the mind. After Freud’s death in 1939, the development did not stop, but as the clinical spectrum changed, psychotherapists were confronted with new kinds of patients, necessitating new psychodynamic models to understand and treat them. Freud’s first model of the mind was a model of the traumatised psyche, a model of the post trauma mind.
