ABSTRACT
Psychiatry traditionally divides itself into three camps the biological, the social, and the dynamic each with its own models of mental illness, treatment methods, and spheres of influence. There are signs that this comfortable tripartite arrangement is nearing an end. Neuropharmacologists study the mechanisms by which trauma can affect brain chemistry but advocate psychotherapy as, on occasion, the best treatment for depression. For Freud the dynamic nature of the psyche was particularly evident in two kinds of clinical phenomena. Non-biological treatments in psychiatry are often referred to as ‘psychosocial’ interventions. Dynamic psychiatry is contextual and ‘deconstructive’ in the sense that the naive idea of illness, the role of the doctor as a benign figure, or the conscious aims of therapy are not taken at face value, but seen in a wider context of the unconscious as well as the conscious mind. Psychoanalysis firmly established a framework for dynamic psychiatry at the turn of the previous century.
