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From the day in 1897 when Freud lost faith in his 'neurotica' (i.e. his patients' accounts of their 'actual' sexual traumas) psychoanalysis became a science founded on a developmental theory of the mind. His discovery (or, if one wills, his codification) of infantile sexuality led in 1905 to the formulation of a distinctive and systematic conception of mental development as adumbrated in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality —a conception that served, and for many continues to serve, as the fundamental underpinning of psychoanalytic ideas about the evolution of the mind and its conflicts. Though largely derived reconstructively from the analysis of adults, the Freudian theory of libidinal development, with a few elaborations by Abraham, Anna Freud and others, seemed to provide a schema that could readily be applied in child rearing and in clinical work with children. It served as the conceptual foundation for what came to be known as the 'genetic' point of view in psychoanalytic metapsychology.
The decades that had followed have, however, seen extensive additions to and revisions of Freud's model. These modifications have derived from two principal sources—analytic therapy and other modes of clinical work with children, and direct observation of infants and children in non-clinical settings. Both have yielded a wealth of data—and interpretations of data—that by the century's end have left us with a proliferation of viewpoints, some enriching Freud's schema, some in apparent conflict with it. Indeed, even within the broad mainstream of psychoanalysis as represented by the International Psychoanalytical Association, variant schools of analytic thought can be differentiated by their commitment to conceptions of child development that diverge sharply from the 'classical' Freudian model (e.g. Klein, Kohut).