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If one compares the psychiatry before Freud and its development since Freud's discoveries, one is struck by an essential difference. The symptoms of neurosis were formerly accounted for in purely descriptive terms, and the terms were no more than labels. The essential change which Freud introduced in the approach toward neurotic symptoms was that one could consider them explainable. They acquired a meaning; they were no longer regarded as foreign bodies within the mind, but as an intelligible part of the personality.
But they can be understood as part of the personality only after having been correctly interpreted. The neurotic symptom stands for the patient's memories, conflicting tendencies, thoughts, impulses, fears, which instead of appearing as such are disguised as a neurotic symptom. These tendencies as well as the disguising forces must be interpreted in order to understand and explain the meaning of a symptom.
As we know, at a later stage Freud was able to establish that the neurotic symptoms are determined by typical pathogenic conflicts and that the forces underlying them, the libidinal and aggressive drives, as well as the forces of defense against these drives, present particular developmental characteristics and can be described in a scientific way. This is why in reports published on the results of analytic investigations of individual neuroses, the symptoms are usually interpreted in terms that strike psychoanalysts as well as their critics as being relatively monotonous. When we interpret the meaning of a neurotic symptom, we explain it dynamically as an interplay of forces and genetically as a result of the interplay between