The article summarizes contemporary ideas about the role and place of mental protective mechanisms and their relationship with the stress response in the emergence of neurotic, stress-related, and somatoform disorders. Stress reaction is considered from the point of view of the inconsistency between the dominant requirement and the possibility of its satisfaction. The variants of the development of mental disorders of the neurotic register are given, depending on the phase of stress according (to Н. Selye), in which they arose. From these positions, the mechanisms of forming certain nosologies of the neurotic register are given through the use of non-adaptive ("immature") protective mechanisms (for A. Freud). The indicative scheme of the pathogenesis of neurotic, stress-related and somatoform disorders is presented. The prospects of non-drug treatment of these disorders are defi ned as a symbolic restoration of the correspondence between "I want and I can", with ineff ectiveness of traditional psychopharmacological treatment.