Revised Diagnostic Profile 2016: Revisions, Rationale, and Further Thoughts

ABSTRACT

In 2001, a working party at the Anna Freud Centre undertook the task of looking at Anna Freud’s original Provisional Diagnostic Profile and seeing if, in the light of current knowledge, modifications should be made. A broad view of the mind as a complex dynamic system sculpted out of biopsychosocial forces underpins the chapter with reference to allied disciplines and research. The chapter considers the rationale for adding certain features and highlighting and/or reframing others. In shifting the emphases from the original drive theory perspective to an explicitly object relational one, the authors acknowledge the altered metapsychology while arguing that the revisions preserve the original psychoanalytic and developmental template, including the importance of the psychosexual organization. The authors offer their suggestions to the question in 2015: would yet further revisions need to be made and if so which? The working party reconvened in 2016 to further revise the Provisional Diagnostic Profile.