ABSTRACT
The most important contribution from psychoanalysis to psychiatry and to psychiatric classification is the destruction of the old idea of disease entities. Anna Freud had introduced the idea of dependence and the matter of ego-weakness and -strength became significant in psycho-analytic metapsychology. Freud concerned himself with three aspects of psychiatric illness. One was behaviour, the patient’s relation to reality. The second was symptom-formation, which Freud established as a communication, this concept being part of his new understanding of the unconscious. The third was aetiology, which Freud transformed by introducing the idea of the developmental process. The term psycho-neurosis implies to analysts that the patient as an infant and child reached to a certain stage of emotional development and that, genital primacy and the stage of the Oedipus complex having been achieved, certain defences against castration anxiety have become organized.
