Psychoanalysis

  *Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques that deal in part with the unconscious mind, and which together form a method of treatment for mental disorders. 

*The discipline was established in the early 1890s by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, who developed the practice from his theoretical model of personality organization and development, psychoanalytic theory.

*Psychoanalysis was later developed in different directions, mostly by students of Freud, such as Alfred Adler and his collaborator, Carl Gustav Jung, as well as by neo-Freudian thinkers, such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan.

*Psychoanalysis is a controversial discipline, and its effectiveness as a treatment has been contested. 

*Psychoanalytic concepts are also widely used outside the therapeutic arena, in areas such as psychoanalytic literary criticism, as well as in the analysis of film, fairy tales, philosophical perspectives as Freudo-Marxism and other cultural phenomena.

Basic features of Psychoanalysis. 

*A person's development is determined by often forgotten events in early childhood, rather than by inherited traits alone.

Human behaviour and cognition are largely determined by instinctual drives that are rooted in the unconscious.

Attempts to bring such drives into awareness triggers resistance in the form of defense mechanisms, particularly repression.

Conflicts between conscious and unconscious material can result in mental disturbances, such as neurosis, neurotic traits, anxiety, and depression.

Unconscious material can be found in dreams and unintentional acts, including mannerisms and slips of the tongue.

Liberation from the effects of the unconscious is achieved by bringing this material into the conscious mind through therapeutic intervention.

The "centerpiece of the psychoanalytic process" is the transference, whereby patients relive their infantile conflicts by projecting onto the analyst feelings of love, dependence and anger.

*Sigmund Freud first used the term 'psychoanalysis' (French: psychanalyse) in 1896, ultimately retaining the term for his own school of thought.  In November 1899, he wrote the " Interpretation of Dreams" (German: Die Traumdeutung), which Freud thought of as his "most significant work".

*Freud's first theory to explain hysterical symptoms was presented in "Studies on Hysteria" (1895; Studien über Hysterie), co-authored with his mentor the distinguished physician Josef Breuer, which was generally seen as the birth of psychoanalysis.

*In 1896, Freud also published his seduction theory, claiming to have uncovered repressed memories of incidents of sexual abuse for all his current patients, from which he proposed that the preconditions for hysterical symptoms are sexual excitations in infancy.

*Though in 1896 he had reported that his patients "had no feeling of remembering the [infantile sexual] scenes", and assured him "emphatically of their unbelief", in later accounts he claimed that they had told him that they had been sexually abused in infancy.

*In 1905, Freud published Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in which he laid out his discovery of the psychosexual phases:

Oral (ages 0–2);

Anal (2–4);

Phallic-oedipal or First genital (3–6);

Latency (6–puberty); and

Mature genital (puberty–onward).

*His early formulation included the idea that because of societal restrictions, sexual wishes were repressed into an unconscious state, and that the energy of these unconscious wishes could be turned into anxiety or physical symptoms.

*Freud suggested his 'dual drive' theory of sexuality and aggression in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, to try to begin to explain human destructiveness. Also, it was the first appearance of his "structural theory" consisting of three new concepts id, ego, and superego.

*Three years later, in 1923, he summarised the ideas of id, ego, and superego in The Ego and the Id.

* In the book, he revised the whole theory of mental functioning, now considering that repression was only one of many defense mechanisms, and that it occurred to reduce anxiety.

*Structural theory divides the psyche into the id, the ego, and the super-ego. The id is present at birth as the repository of basic instincts, which Freud called "Triebe" ("drives"): unorganized and unconscious, it operates merely on the 'pleasure principle', without realism or foresight. The ego develops slowly and gradually, being concerned with mediating between the urging of the id and the realities of the external world; it thus operates on the 'reality principle'. The super-ego is held to be the part of the ego in which self-observation, self-criticism and other reflective and judgmental faculties develop. The ego and the super-ego are both partly conscious and partly unconscious

*the concepts of a fixed id, ego and superego, and instead posits conscious and unconscious conflict among wishes (dependent, controlling, sexual, and aggressive), guilt and shame, emotions (especially anxiety and depressive affect), and defensive operations that shut off from consciousness some aspect of the others. Moreover, healthy functioning (adaptive) is also determined, to a great extent, by resolutions of conflict.

*Jacques Lacan frequently used the phrase "retourner à Freud" ("return to Freud") in his seminars and writings, as he claimed that his theories were an extension of Freud's own, contrary to those of Anna Freud, the Ego Psychology, object relations and "self" theories and also claims the necessity of reading Freud's complete works, not only a part of them. Lacan's concepts concern the "mirror stage", the "Real", the "Imaginary", and the "Symbolic", and the claim that "the unconscious is structured as a language."

*Freudian theories hold that adult problems can be traced to unresolved conflicts from certain phases of childhood and adolescence, caused by fantasy, stemming from their own drives. Freud, based on the data gathered from his patients early in his career, suspected that neurotic disturbances occurred when children were sexually abused in childhood (i.e. seduction theory).

*Many psychoanalysts who work with children have studied the actual effects of child abuse, which include ego and object relations deficits and severe neurotic conflicts. Much research has been done on these types of trauma in childhood, and the adult sequelae of those. In studying the childhood factors that start neurotic symptom development, Freud found a constellation of factors that, for literary reasons, he termed the Oedipus complex, based on the play by Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, in which the protagonist unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother. The validity of the Oedipus complex is now widely disputed and rejected.

*The basic method of psychoanalysis is interpretation of the patient's unconscious conflicts that are interfering with current-day functioning – conflicts that are causing painful symptoms such as phobias, anxiety, depression, and compulsions.