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Freud explicitly referred throughout all his works to the adult neuroses as processes at the basis of which it was always possible to find an infantile disturbance.1 This is still a basic hypothesis of psychoanalysis.
In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Freud said: “In my experience, which is already extensive, the chief part in the mental lives of all children who later become psychoneurotics is played by their parents. Being in love with the one parent and hating the other are among the essential constituents of the stock of psychical impulses which is formed at that time and which is of such importance in determining the symptoms of the later neurosis” (pp. 260-261).
In the “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy” Freud (1909) referred to the fact that the neuroses of adults “could in every instance be traced back to the same infantile complexes