Psychoanalysis

9 Key excerpts on "Psychoanalysis"

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  eBook - ePub

  A Short Introduction to Psychoanalysis

  • Jane Milton, Caroline Polmear, Julia Fabricius(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  2 BASICS OF PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY Psychoanalysis is a branch of psychology particularly concerned with subjective experience. It has three aspects. First, it is a body of knowledge about the mind, which has been discovered partly through the sort of work described in the previous chapter and partly through studying ordinary human phenomena such as dreams, slips (like slips of the tongue) and jokes. Second, the word ‘Psychoanalysis’ refers to a method for investigating the mind. Third, Psychoanalysis refers to a form of psychotherapeutic treatment. Psychoanalysis takes a dynamic rather than a static view of the mind, seeing movement, energy and in particular conflict as intrinsic to mental life. For example, a person may want to do something his or her conscience doesn’t allow, or may be pulled in different ways by love and hate for the same person. He or she may want to know the truth but also be frightened and reluctant to find out. Central to psychoanalytic theory is the idea that much of our mental life is unconscious. Unconscious thoughts, feelings and wishes form the mental bedrock, with conscious experience the tip of the iceberg. Unconscious processes cannot, by definition, be known directly but have to be inferred by their effects, analogous to the powerful but invisible effect of gravity. Psychoanalytic theory offers a developmental perspective. Although there are a number of partly overlapping and sometimes conflicting psychoanalytic theories of development, all emphasise the formative effect of early relationships. Early experience is seen as interacting with innate endowment in determining the way the mind forms. Normal development involves acquiring an increasingly clear and stable sense of self, and an increasing capacity to relate to others as separate and unique

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  Study Guide to a General Overview of Sigmund Freud

  • Intelligent Education(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Influence Publishers

    (Publisher)

  (A student once observed that a Freudian footnote was often worth more than chapters by other psychologists.) And one of the principal tasks of this brief work will be the attempt to help clarify just what Freudian Psychoanalysis is, and just what it is not. A monumental confusion abounds in the minds of students and professionals alike in attempting to distinguish the principles of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy. These terms are often used with a great deal of imprecision as interchangeable, which they are not! As a brief working definition of Psychoanalysis, the author proposes the following: Psychoanalysis is just what Freud says it is and nothing else. He himself felt bitter about the appropriation of the term made by C. G. Jung and others and argued in the Introductory Lectures and elsewhere that since he had made the fundamental discoveries of this revolutionary science of the mind, he and he alone was entitled to say what doctrines comprised Psychoanalysis. The stupendous discoveries of the unconscious mind, the Oedipus Complex, the nature of dreams, the etiology of the neuroses, infantile sexuality, and the origin and meaning of civilization’s most important institutions, religion, morality, the family, and art, plus the elaboration of a therapeutic technique which could uncover the most hidden recesses of the human psyche and alleviate the suffering of neurotically ill human beings, gave him the legitimate right, Freud argued, to demarcate the boundaries of the science of Psychoanalysis. Any psychology which claimed this august title for itself but at the same time denied the relevance of these discoveries simply was not Psychoanalysis. His biographer Dr. Ernest Jones has written that Freud’s discoveries must be studied chronologically in collaboration with a step-by-step discussion of the growth and changes in his personality

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  Theoretical Approaches in Psychology

  • Matt Jarvis(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  events to the unconscious mind, and by unconscious motives. Although consciously, Alex thought she was taking her sister to sea for a birthday treat, the event seems to have quite a different meaning to her unconscious mind. We might even wonder whether Alex was motivated on an unconscious level to take her sister to sea again in order to kill her.
• In contrast to other branches of psychology which place a strong emphasis on systematic, scientific research,
psychodynamic psychology looks for information in dreams, symptoms, irrational behaviour and what patients say in therapy.
(Adapted from Rycroft, 1968; Tavris and Wade, 1997; Jarvis, 2000)
If you know very little about psychology, and you have heard of just one psychologist, the chances are that this is Sigmund Freud, the founder of the psychodynamic approach to psychology, or Psychoanalysis. If Freud (or at least Freud as he is popularly portrayed) represents your layperson’s idea of psychology then you probably have an image of a patient lying on a couch talking about their deepest and darkest secrets. In deliberate contrast to behavioural psychology, examined in Chapter 2 , psychodynamic psychology ignores the trappings of science and instead focuses on trying to get ‘inside the head’ of individuals in order to make sense of their relationships, experiences and how they see the world.
In this chapter we can look at the work of Freud and that of one other influential psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott. We can then look at how psychodynamic principles have been applied in the field of mental health, and use them to try to understand the popularity of monsters, a seemingly irrational phenomenon common throughout history and common to many cultures.

Freud’s theories

Sigmund Freud (writing between the 1890s and the 1930s) developed a collection of theories which have formed the basis of the psychodynamic approach to psychology. His theories are clinically derived—i.e. based on what his patients told him during therapy. Freud theorised on a wide variety of topics and developed his ideas throughout the period of his writing. It is not possible to overview all or most of Freud’s ideas in this chapter, but we can look briefly at a few of Freud’s more important contributions.