The third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM III), published by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980, brought about a paradigmatic change in psychiatric knowledge in the United States, as well as in other countries around the world. In this article we present a short history of this change, and discuss the new architecture of the manual and its logic of classification. Our argument focuses around the way the concepts of “neurosis” and “sexual disorders” were dealt with in the latest version of the manual.
History of psychiatry; diagnosis; DSM III