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What is Psychoanalysis Theory -
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis
This page provides valuable information about the life and work of Sigmund
Freud. In this article we will discuss What is Psychoanalysis theory in detail.
Who Developed Psychoanalysis
From the 1890s until his death in 1939, the German
physician Sigmund Freud developed a method of psychotherapy known as Psychoanalysis
and also known as Sigmund Freud Psychoanalysis in Psychology, Psychoanalytic
Theory.
Psychoanalysis founder Freud's
understanding of the mind was largely based on interpretive methods,
introspection and clinical observations, and was focused in particular on
resolving unconscious conflict, mental distress, and psychopathology.
Psychoanalysis in Psychology Freud's
theories became very well-known, largely because they tackled subjects such as
sexuality, repression, and the unconscious mind as general aspects of
psychological development. Clinically, he helped to pioneer the method of free
association and a therapeutic interest in dreams.
Psychoanalysis Near Me | Freud Psychoanalysis in Psychology had
a significant influence on Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, whose analytical
psychology became an alternative form of depth psychology.
Other well-known
psychoanalytic thinkers of the mid-twentieth century included Sigmund Freud's
daughter psychoanalyst Anna Freud, German-American psychologist Erik Erickson,
Austrian-British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, English psychoanalyst and
physician D. W. Winnicott, German psychologist Karen Horney, German-born
psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm, and English psychiatrist John
Bowlby.
Throughout the 20th century, psychoanalysis in psychology therapy evolved
into diverse schools of thought, most of which may be known as Neo-Freudian.
Psychoanalysis in Psychology Theory
and Therapy was criticized by psychologists such as B. F. Skinner and
Hans Eysenck, and by philosophers including Karl Popper.
Skinner and
other behaviorists believed that psychology should be more empirical and
efficient than psychoanalysis, although they frequently agreed with Freud in
ways that became overlooked as time passed.
While scholars of the humanities maintained that Freud was
not a "scientist at all, but - an interpreter.
Freudian Psychoanalysis in Psychology
is not a magic bullet and it is not for everyone.
Psychoanalytic treatment is best suited for people who are
interested in understanding themselves and in taking a careful look at how
their own thoughts and feelings, some of which may be unconscious, contribute
to their difficulties.
Psychoanalytic treatment can help with:
- Troubled relationships
- Poor self-esteem
- Sexual troubles
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Chronic irritability
- Post-traumatic stress disorders
- Unresolved grief
- Obsessions and compulsions
- Phobias
- Psychosomatic conditions
- Blocked creativity
- Work and academic inhibitions
- Self-defeating behavior
- Attachment disorders
Psychoanalysis Therapy Complete Procedure
1. Free Association Methodin Psychoanalysis
Freud adopted the method of the free association during
1892-1898, starting from several criteria. The method was to replace the use of
hypnosis. It relied on Freud's belief in psychic determinism.
According to that
perspective, psychic activity is not subordinated to free choice. All our mind
produces has an unconscious root we can reach by means of free association.
The theory of psychic determinism is amply debated upon in
Freud's work The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
It is in the same place that
we find plenty of instances of free association related to various faulty and
symptomatic acts (Freudian slips and mistakes), proving that involuntary psychic
acts too are determined by specific causes.
We can say that this method is the
the golden rule of the psychoanalytic therapy.
Let us see how it works.
Lying on a smooth chair (state of relaxation), the patient
speaks freely of anything that may cross his/her mind, without searching for
some specific subject or topic. The flow of his/her thoughts is free, and
followed with no voluntary intervention.
The important thing is that the
critical mind does not intervene to censor spontaneous thoughts. We truly have the drive to censure the products of our
thinking, starting from various criteria: moral, ethical, narcissistic, cultural,
spiritual.
The method of free associations demands us to temporarily
give up intellectual censorship and freely speak about any thought.
Later analysis
of thoughts produced by means of the above-mentioned method reveals certain
repetitive topics indicative of psychic complexes of emotional charge. These complexes are unconscious.
They are autonomously
activated by chance verbal associations, and influence conscious psychic life
in a frequently dramatic manner. The task of psychoanalysis is to bring such
complexes to the surface of conscious mind, and integrate them into the
patient's life.
Example of Free Association
Lying on a couch, in dim light and in a peaceful room,
the patient produces the following free associations:
I am thinking of the fluffy clouds I seem to see with my
very eyes. They are white and pearly. The sky is full of clouds but a few azure
patches can still be seen here and there. Clouds keep changing their shapes.
They are fluid because they are condensed water particles.
Also I am thinking I may have an obsession with this water. The doctor
has told me I am dehydrated; there's not enough water in my body. He suggested
I should drink 2-3 liters of water every day.
Similarly I thought there is a connection between my need to add salt
to my food and thirst. My body has found itself a pretext, salty food, to
make me drink more water. I have a lot of thoughts about the manifestations of
my body, which seem logical and aim at inner balance.
Everybody has in fact got an inner physician in oneself.
If you allow yourself to lie at the
will of your free inclinations, with no assumptions whatsoever, you will have
the intuition of making things that may surprise you, nevertheless useful to
your body and securing your health and high spirits.
I read somewhere that one can be
one's, own doctor - Everybody can be one's, own doctor.
Interpretation of Free Association
We put a stop here to the flow of our patient's
associations. We may notice these are indirectly related to the relationship
with her therapist. Her associations related to the spontaneous medicine of her
body lead to the idea that no physician is in fact necessary.
The patient thinks the psychoanalyst has in fact no
contribution to her well being, that she could very well do without one.
We must admit the series of free associations produced by
the patient is somehow related to her present circumstances, including
the recent reality, her psychoanalytic therapy. The novelty of the therapy, the
relationship with the psychoanalyst automatically induces thoughts,
remarks, more or less recent memories.
The fact that, during her therapy, the patient alludes to a
doctor, who had in fact done nothing to help her, is no mere chance.
This memory can be related to the present circumstance and
it may be translated in the patient's skepticism concerning the utility of this
analytic therapy.
Nevertheless, this skepticism has an even older history,
bringing to the fore the patient's relationship with her mother, when still a
child, and dependent on her parent's support.
Notes:
Freud had used the method of free association in his
self-analysis, in dream interpretation. In his Studies on Hysteria (1895), the
emphasis increasingly lay on the patient's spontaneous expression.
Freud
remembers Emmy Von M., his patient who, on his urge to find the root of a
certain symptom had given the following answer:
He should not keep
asking about the origin of this or the other, but allow her to talk to him about
anything that crosses her mind.
Psychoanalysis in Psychology Freud
also remarked that:
"Her accounts are not as unintentional as they seem;
rather, they quite closely reproduce her memories, and new impressions, since
our latest meeting and often, quite unexpectedly, spread from the pathogenic
reminiscences she spontaneously discharges herself through words.
2. Freud Interpretation of Dream Analysis
Sigmund Freud clearly asserts that the theory
of dreams "occupies a special place in the history of psychoanalysis and
marks a turning-point; it was with it that analysis took the step from being a
psycho-therapeutic procedure to being a depth-psychology".
The theory of dreams is the most characteristic and singular
an aspect of psychoanalytic science, "something to which there is no
a counterpart in the rest of our knowledge, a stretch of a new country, which has
been reclaimed from popular beliefs and mysticism."
Freud Interpretation of Dream Analysis, in psychoanalysis in psychology,
provides the possibility to decipher the mystery of neurotic disorders,
specifically hysteria, and secondly, it opens the road towards the unconscious.
Freud's phrase: "The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a
knowledge of the unconscious" has become famous.
The first great dream interpreted by Freud that leads him to
his great discoveries were materialized in 1895. It is the famous dream of
Irma's injection, which Freud almost thoroughly analyzed and published in his
grandiose work The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).
The dream was approached in a manner, which was to become
specific for the practitioners of psychoanalysis in psychology, by means of the dreamer's
associations.
Dream Analysis
Freud (details are provided in the quoted book) reveals Freud's feelings
of guilt towards Irma, one of his young patients, whose treatment had not
yielded the expected results.
Freud defends himself from these negative
feelings in his dream, blaming his very patient who, apparently, were not
a submissive and compliant patient, or Dr. Otto, one of his colleagues, guilty of
a careless medical intervention (an injection with an infected syringe).
After analyzing his dream, most coherent as it proved, Freud
justly declared that dreams are not meaningless, they are not absurd; they do
not imply that one portion of our store of ideas is asleep while another
the portion is beginning to wake.
On the contrary, they are psychical phenomena of
complete validity - fulfillment of wishes.
Dreams, therefore, require integration into the range of
intelligible waking mental acts; "they are constructed by a highly
complicated activity of the mind. (Chapter "A Dream is the Fulfillment of a Wish".)
This assertion, in fact, expresses a great opening towards
the activity of abysmal psyche, and mostly the belief in psychic determinism, in
the idea that all psychic deeds have their own meaning and connect today
activities, even in a somewhat less visible manner.
Contrary to the general opinion of his time's scientific
world, Freud thinks dreams are a coherent psychic activity, that can be
analyzed in depth.
Nevertheless, the comprehensive definition of the dream
includes other discoveries too, the true sign of Freudian approach original
character: "a dream is a (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed or
repressed) wish". (Chapter Distortion in Dreams.)
This definition emphasizes two key aspects of the theory of
dreams:
Dreams are a disguised fulfillment
of a wish, and
This is a repressed wish.
We can, therefore, conclude that disguise is caused by
repression.
That is the reason why all dream researchers before Freud were not
able to discover these facts: they only analyzed the manifest content of the
dream, that is its outer shape at wakening time, its facade, not caring about
latent thoughts giving rise to its becoming, thoughts we reach by means of the
method of associations devised by Freud.
Psychoanalysis in Psychology Freud
goes even further to analyze the nature of distortion by the dream, partially
the work of dream-censorship and partly of dream-work, a complex process by
means of which latent thoughts are turned into dreams as such.
Freud's analysis includes dream-work and the end of his
the book also provides us his opinions concerning the psychology of the dream
process: primary and secondary processes, repression, unconscious, etc.
That is why The Interpretation of Dreams represents
the major work on dreams and unconscious life, not equaled so far! It remains
an essential stage in the study of psychoanalysis!
In spite of the importance of
dream-analysis for the discovery of abysmal psyche functioning as well as for
therapy as such, this crucial field of psychoanalysis in psychology has no more concerned
psychoanalysts after Freud's research.
Notes:
It is the securest foundation of psychoanalysis in psychology and
the field in which every worker must acquire his convictions and seek his training.
3. Analysis of Resistance or Analysis of Resistance in Psychoanalytic Therapy
It became evident that the work of uncovering what had been
photogenically forgotten had to struggle against a constant and very intense
resistance.
The critical objections which the patient raised in order to avoid
communicating the ideas which occurred to him, and against which the fundamental
rule of psychoanalysis was directed, had themselves already been manifestations
of this resistance.
A consideration of the phenomena of resistance led to one of
the corner-stones of the psychoanalytic theory of the neuroses - the theory of
repression.
It was plausible to suppose that the same forces which were
now struggling against the pathogenic material being made conscious had at an
earlier times made the same efforts with success. (Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 1940.)
Five Kinds of Resistances
Further investigation of the subject shows that the analyst
has to combat no less than five kinds of resistance, emanating from
three directions - the ego, the id, and the super-ego. The ego is the source of
three of these, each differing in its dynamic nature.
The first of these three ego-resistances is the repression
resistance, which we have already discussed above and about which there is
least new to be added.
Next, there is the transference resistance, which is of the
same nature but which has different and much clearer effects in analysis, since
it succeeds in establishing a relation to the analytic situation or the analyst
himself and thus re-animating repression which should only have been
recollected.
The third resistance, though also an ego-resistance, is of
quite a different nature. It proceeds from the gain from illness and is based
upon an assimilation of the symptom into the ego. It represents an
unwillingness to renounce any satisfaction or relief that has been obtained.
The fourth variety, arising from the id, is the resistance
which, as we have just seen, necessitates "working-through". The
fifth, coming from the super-ego and the last to be discovered, is also the
most obscure though not always the least powerful one.
It seems to originate from the sense of guilt or the need
for punishment; and it opposes every move towards success, including,
therefore, the patient's own recovery through analysis. (Sigmund Freud: Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, 1926.)
4. Transference or What is Transference in Psychology
"It is the feelings of the analyst toward the
patient."
The patient is not satisfied with regarding the analyst in
the light of reality as a helper and adviser who, moreover, is remunerated for
the trouble he takes and who would himself be content with some such role as
that of a guide on a difficult mountain climb.
On the contrary, the patient sees in him the return, the
reincarnation, of some important figure out of his childhood or past, and
consequently transfers on to him feelings and reactions which undoubtedly
applied to this prototype.
This fact of transference soon proves to be a factor of
undreamt-of importance, on the one hand, an instrument of irreplaceable value
and on the other hand a source of serious dangers.
This B is ambivalent: it comprises positive
(affectionate) as well as negative (hostile) attitudes towards the analyst, who
as a rule is put in the place of one or other of the patient's parents, his
father, or mother. (Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis - 1940.)
Universality of Transference
An analysis without transference is an impossibility. It
must not be supposed, however, that transference is created by analysis and
does not occur apart from it.
Transference is merely uncovered and isolated by
analysis. It is a universal phenomenon of the human mind, it decides the
success of all medical influence, and in fact dominates the whole of each
person's relations to his human environment.
We can easily recognize it as the same dynamic factor which
the hypnotists have named 'suggestibility', which is the agent of hypnotic
rapport and whose incalculable behavior led to difficulties with the cathartic
a method as well. (Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study - 1925.)
Absence of Transference
When there is no inclination to a transference of emotion
such as this, or when it has become entirely negative, as happens in dementia
praecox or paranoia, then there is also no possibility of influencing the
patient by psychological means. (Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study - 1925.)
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