Freud's Clinical Category Of 'Actual Neuroses': The Return Of The Repressed

Over the past decade, our society has had to confront the so-called 'new illnesses of the soul'. More and more, clinicians are confronted with pathologies that do not seem to fit into the three major Freudo-Lacanian diagnostic categories of neurosis, psychosis and perversion. These pathologies are borderline personality disorders, posttraumatic stress disorders, substance abuse, self-mutilation, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, psychosomatic phenomena, etc. Since psychoanalytic treatment is worked out only for the three categories mentioned earlier, especially neurosis, any attempt to treat the new patients in the same way is doomed to fail.…