ABSTRACT
Freud considered the "actual neurosis" to be the core of the psychoneuroses. A libidinal imbalance in the Unconscious produced by regressive recathecting of childhood objects gives rise to a transference intrusion into the Preconscious. The change from the earlier to the later theory of anxiety occurred largely because the ego had been given a central place in the functioning and economy of mental life. Many clinical phenomena can be explained by the newer concept of anxiety as a response of and by the ego to threats endangering its organization. Freud used some Lamarckian concepts about the inheritance of acquired characteristics to explain such a tendency that over the aeons of human history affective reponses somehow influenced the germ plasm, eventually being transmitted to offspring. The healthy personality cannot be defined simply by the intactness or firmness of the barriers between its structural components or in terms of undisturbed functions within any one of its systems.
