If we go back to the source, Sigmund Freud, in the beginning of psychoanalysis it was him who decided what was and what was not psychoanalysis, being a concrete proof of this Freud’s text from 1914, ‘On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’: “no one can know better than I do what psychoanalysis is, how it differs from other ways of investigating the life of the mind, and precisely what should be called psychoanalysis and what would better be described by some other name”.[i]

These words make it difficult for us to have a precise definition, since the patriarch of the movement is no longer with us to tells us what psychoanalysis is. We can see this clearly in the different ways taken by the post Freudian schools of thought, so much so that nowadays they can even be contradictory among them. Even so, all these groups recognise that the unconscious exists and that we know so due to its effects—psychoanalysts train to be able to detect these effects in session with a patient—however, which are the effects or how can we detect them are the radical differences between one school of thought and another.

It is worth mentioning that not only psychoanalysts are the ones who deal with this particular problem, both psychology and psychiatry—usual members of the same mental health triad—have been divided in as many or even more branches than the ones we can find in psychoanalysis.