Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition (DSM-III), prepared by the  Committee on Nomenclature and Statistics of the American Psychiatric Association Task Force. Draft Edition, 1977.

The American Psychiatric Association Task Force on Nomenclature and Statistics has completed and distributed for field testing a draft edition of the new DSM. This is not so much a review of the new DSM-III as a preview, and it is written not from the perspective of the manual's usefulness for medical psychiatry but from the position of psychoanalysis as an independent mental health discipline. A distinction between psychiatry and psychoanalysis is important in discussing the DSM-III because, while many psychiatrists and some analytic institutes assert a special relationship between medicine and psychoanalysis, with this book the American Psychiatric Association has withdrawn its claim to psychoanalysis.

The diagnostic category “neurosis” has been eliminated from the DSM-III. This represents more than a shift in nomenclature. The editors of the DSM-III are proposing a fundamental overhauling of the intellectual foundations of psychiatry. The issue for the DSM-III editors is the intellectual viability of psychoanalysis, not only as a treatment modality, but also as a scientific system for understanding and diagnosing all mental functions. Psychoanalytically based concepts of intrapsychic conflict and developmental psychology are