psychoanalysis

—psychoanalytic /suy'koh an'l it"ik/, psychoanalytical, adj. —psychoanalytically, adv.

/suy'koh euh nal"euh sis/, n.

1. a systematic structure of theories concerning the relation of conscious and unconscious psychological processes.

2. a technical procedure for investigating unconscious mental processes and for treating psychoneuroses.

[1905-10; < G Psychoanalyse. See PSYCHO-, ANALYSIS]

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Method of treating mental disorders that emphasizes the probing of unconscious mental processes.

It is based on the psychoanalytic theory devised by Sigmund Freud in Vienna in the late 19th and early 20th century. It calls for patients to engage in free association of ideas, speaking to therapists about anything that comes to mind. Dreams and slips of the tongue are examined as a key to the workings of the unconscious mind, and the "work" of therapy is to uncover the tensions existing between the instinctual drive of the id, the perceptions and actions of the ego, and the censorship imposed by the morality of the superego. Careful attention is paid to early childhood experiences (especially those with a sexual dimension), the memory of which may have been repressed because of guilt or trauma; recalling and analyzing these experiences is thought to help free patients from the anxiety and neuroses caused by repression as well as from more serious illnesses known as psychoses (see neurosis, psychosis). Some of Freud's early associates, notably Carl Gustav Jung and Alfred Adler, rejected his theories on many points and devised alternative methods of analysis. Other important figures in psychoanalysis, including Erik Erikson, Karen Horney, and Erich Fromm, accepted the basic Freudian framework but contributed their own additions or modifications.

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      a highly influential method of treating mental disorders (mental disorder), shaped by psychoanalytic theory, which emphasizes unconscious mental processes and is sometimes described as “depth psychology.”

      The psychoanalytic movement originated in the clinical observations and formulations of the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (Freud, Sigmund), who coined the term. During the 1890s, Freud was associated with another Viennese, Josef Breuer (Breuer, Josef), in studies of neurotic patients under hypnosis. Freud and Breuer observed that, when the sources of patients' ideas and impulses were brought into consciousness during the hypnotic state, the patients showed improvement.

      Observing that most of his patients talked freely without being under hypnosis, Freud evolved the technique of free association of ideas. The patient was encouraged to say anything that came to mind, without regard to its assumed relevancy or propriety. Noting that patients sometimes had difficulty in making free associations, Freud concluded that certain painful experiences were repressed, or held back from conscious awareness. Freud noted that in the majority of the patients seen during his early practice, the events most frequently repressed were concerned with disturbing sexual experiences. Thus he hypothesized that anxiety was a consequence of the repressed energy (libido) attached to sexuality; the repressed energy found expression in various symptoms that served as psychological defense mechanisms. Freud and his followers later extended the concept of anxiety to include feelings of fear, guilt, and shame consequent to fantasies of aggression and hostility and to fear of loneliness caused by separation from a person on whom the sufferer is dependent.

      Freud's free-association technique provided him with a tool for studying the meanings of dreams, slips of the tongue, forgetfulness, and other mistakes and errors in everyday life. From these investigations he was led to a new conception of the structure of personality: the id, ego, and superego. The id is the unconscious reservoir of drives and impulses derived from the genetic background and concerned with the preservation and propagation of life. The ego, according to Freud, operates in conscious and preconscious levels of awareness. It is the portion of the personality concerned with the tasks of reality: perception, cognition, and executive actions. In the superego lie the individual's environmentally derived ideals and values and the mores of his family and society; the superego serves as a censor on the ego functions.

      In the Freudian framework, conflicts among the three structures of the personality are repressed and lead to the arousal of anxiety. The person is protected from experiencing anxiety directly by the development of defense mechanisms, which are learned through family and cultural influences. These mechanisms become pathological when they inhibit pursuit of the satisfactions of living in a society. The existence of these patterns of adaptation or mechanisms of defense are quantitatively but not qualitatively different in the psychotic (psychosis) and neurotic (psychoneurosis) states.

      Freud held that the patient's emotional attachment to the analyst represented a transference of the patient's relationship to parents or important parental figures. Freud held that those strong feelings, unconsciously projected to the analyst, influenced the patient's capacity to make free associations. By objectively treating these responses and the resistances they evoked and by bringing the patient to analyze the origin of those feelings, Freud concluded that the analysis of the transference and the patient's resistance to its analysis were the keystones of psychoanalytic therapy.

      Early schisms over such issues as the basic role that Freud ascribed to biological instinctual processes caused onetime associates Carl Jung (Jung, Carl), Otto Rank (Rank, Otto), and Alfred Adler (Adler, Alfred) to establish their own psychological theories. Most later controversies, however, were over details of Freudian theory or technique and did not lead to a complete departure from the parent system. Other influential theorists have included Erik Erikson (Erikson, Erik H.), Karen Horney (Horney, Karen), Erich Fromm (Fromm, Erich), and Harry Stack Sullivan (Sullivan, Harry Stack). At one time psychiatrists held a monopoly on psychoanalytic practice, but soon nonmedical therapists also were admitted.

      Later developments included work on the technique and theory of psychoanalysis of children. Freud's tripartite division of the mind into id, ego, and superego became progressively more elaborate, and problems of anxiety and female sexuality received increasing attention. Psychoanalysis also found many extraclinical applications in other areas of social thought, particularly anthropology and sociology, and in literature and the arts.

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