You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The contents of these volumes will remind psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and other mental health workers of a tradition in psychiatric theory and practice. It is a tradition whose origins are to be found in the writings of Bleuler, Freud, and Adolf Meyer. It merits the description “dynamic” because it attributes to mental conflict, conscious or unconscious, a major role in mental pathology. Clinically dynamic psychiatry employs the descriptive and explanatory concepts of psychoanalysis. It recognizes the part that constitutional factors play in the genesis of mental illnesses. Dynamic psychiatry is psychobiological in its orientation, and this is reflected in the emphasis it places on the psychological and somatic aspects of the aetiology of mental disorders.
Clinical description is the basis of psychodynamic psychiatry. Frosch points out that clinical phenomena alone cannot provide the foundation for a classification of mental disorders that is to accommodate the uniformity and diversity characteristic of the clinical entities of psychiatry. On this ground he is critical of DSM III. Throughout the two volumes he compares and contrasts the psychodynamic classification with that of DSM III and DSMIII-R.
A psychodynamic nosology must have a frame of reference within which clinical phenomena can be located and interconnected. From Freud onward, clinical manifestations have been related to a variety of psychoanalytic frames of reference. Among others, Frosch describes Freud's early attempt to classify the hysterias, obsessional neuroses, paranoia, and hallucinatory states on the basis of the patient's age at which the traumatic experience occurred. Others, notably Glover, Rado, and Menninger, have used concepts drawn from the structural theory, the dual instinct theory and the libido theory to construct classification schemes. Anna Freud's diagnostic profile for children and adults employs a series of frames of reference drawn from psychoanalytic theories. Frosch postulat