Introduction

Psychoanalysis first developed as a method of therapy in the strict medical sense. Freud had discovered that certain circumscribed disorders that have no discernible organic basis—such as hysterical convulsions, phobias, depressions, drug addictions, functional stomach upsets—can be cured by uncovering the unconscious factors that underlie them. In the course of time disturbances of this kind were summarily called neurotic.