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Anyone who approaches the psychoanalytic literature, whether as an analyst in training or as a student of psychoanalysis, soon encounters a remarkable limitation in that discipline, which has to do with the subject of psychopathology. Theoretical texts on psychoanalysis abound, and there is even a plethora of literature on psychoanalytic technique, but the number of monographs on psychopathology that systematically present the psychopathological model derived from psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice is very small. Psychopathology might be described as the poor relation within the set of component parts making up the doctrine of psychoanalysis.
However, psychoanalysis arose as an attempt to explain the symptoms of the neurotic patients who presented themselves at neurologists' consulting rooms at the end of the nineteenth century. When Freud commenced his medical practice he was very concerned to construct a psychopathological model that would help him to classify and understand these disorders. He gradually came to concentrate much more on the building of a structural model to explain the functioning of the mind, although he continued to undertake sporadic studies of non-neurotic clinical pictures. No subsequent author, except Fenichel, has attempted a systematisation of the aetiopathogenic and nosographic model derived from psychoanalysis.
The concern of psychoanalysis with the new clinical pictures that had appeared, either for sociocultural reasons or because advances in psychoanalysis itself had made them accessible to study, was not paralleled by an interest in the progressive incorporation of research on these pictures within the psychopathological edifice shared by the psychoanalysts. Owing to the