It is in that respect that all the psychiatry of the nineteenth century really does converge on Freud, who was the first to accept the seriousness of the reality of the doctor patient couple, and who consented never to avert his gaze and his research from this link, and who sought not to mask it in a psychiatric theory merely attempting to keep in harmony with the rest of medical knowledge: he was the first to have followed the rigour of these consequences very closely.