Starting from a review of classical and recent psychiatric literature, the author shows how crisis intervention, originated from the observation and treatment of normal individuals disturbed in their psychic equilibrium by stressful events, has been widely applied to the whole psychopathology. The author States that psychoanalytic theory can supply useful items for the comprehension of the crisis intervention’s description and validation. This comprehension allows to keep a methodological continuity between the crisis and the psychotherapeutic interventions: the psychotherapeutic one shall be brief and short-term, in order to foster, through the transference analysis in the here-and-now, the working through of suggestion, which is inevitable in any crisis intervention.