[The Psychiatric and Social-Communication Record, an instrument for the standardized inventory of neurotic findings].

The comparable documentation of neurotic conditions is a supposition for the scientific access to neuroses, especially concerning psychotherapy research and epidemiology. Efforts on this field have rarely brought satisfying results. This paper shows the construction and the application of a documentary scheme, which describes neurotic conditions under a psychoanalytic point of view and accentuates the aspect of interpersonal relationships: The psychic and socialcommunicative report (PSB). In contrast to other charts, PSB avoids the use of psychoanalytic theory and of psychopathological terms and describes neurotic traits in everyday-language, which makes the system easy to use. After the psychoanalytic interview the investigator or therapist does a rating of the 82 PSB-items. This gives both a quantitative and qualitative description of the neurotic disease. In several projects including follow-up studies of psychotherapy-patients PSB-instrument was useful for important questions of psychotherapy research. The combination of PSB with documentation of patient's life-data allows correlation of "soft" personality-data and "hard" social data. In medical student's training PSB helps to teach systematic examination of neurotic patients.