Psychoanalysis may be defined as (1) a psychological theory; (2) a form of psychotherapy, especially for the treatment of neurotic and character or personality disorders; and (3) a method for investigating psychological phenomena. Psychoanalysis was created and developed by Sigmund Freud, who presented his method, clinical observations, and theory in Interpretation of Dreams and other major works, including The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, as well as in many of his case studies.
Generally, psychoanalysis is concerned with the causal role of wishes and beliefs in human life. More specifically, it attempts to explain mental or behavioral phenomena that do not appear to make sense as the effects of unconscious wishes and beliefs. Such phenomena include dreams, disturbances in functioning such as slips of the tongue or pen and transient forgetting, and neurotic symptoms. Typically, unconscious wishes and beliefs are constituents of conflicts.
The term unconscious in psychoanalysis does not mean simply that mental contents are out of awareness. Its psychodynamic meaning is that the person does not want to be aware of these contents, and takes active steps to avoid being aware of them. A fundamental hypothesis of psychoanalysis is that because a mental entity is dynamically unconscious it has the causal power to produce the phenomena that are of interest to psychoanalysis.
At first, the dynamic unconscious was thought to consist of traumatic memories. Later, it was believed to consist of impulses or wishes—especially sexual (and aggressive) impulses or wishes. Psychoanalysis now emphasizes that the dynamic unconscious consists of fantasies, which have a history reaching back to childhood. These fantasies are internal scenarios in which sexual (and aggressive) wishes are imagined as fulfilled.
Psychoanalysis is distinct in attributing causal powers to unconscious sexual wishes. Such attribution depends on extending the meaning of sexual to encompass the quest for sensual pleasure in childhood (so-called infantile sexuality) and choices of objects and aims. One theme that is thought to have particular importance is the Oedipus complex, in which the child rivals one parent in seeking sensual gratifications of various kinds from the other parent.
When an unconscious fantasy is activated, it manifests itself in conscious mental states or in actions—importantly, in emotions; in interpretations of the significance of events or states of affairs; in attributions of motives to others; and in daydreams, dreams, and neurotic symptoms.
Unconscious fantasies, as distinct from both conscious reality-oriented imagining and conscious day-dreaming, are constructed when imagination functions under very special conditions.
This emphasis on fantasy underscores the fact that psychoanalysis gives priority to the relation between wishes (including wishes a person knows could not conceivably be gratified in reality) and imagination (functioning under very special conditions).
Free association is the method of psychoanalysis. Patients are encouraged not to talk about some particular problem or aspect of their lives but rather to suspend any conscious purposive organization of what they say, speaking freely. Both psychoanalyst and patient follow the patient's productions: conscious purposes are replaced by unconscious purposes, which, under these conditions, can determine the direction of the patient's mental processes with less interference.
Interventions are predominantly interpretative; psychoanalysts do not seek primarily to tell their patients what to do, to educate them about the world, to influence their values, or to reassure them in one way or another that everything is or will be all right. Psychoanalysts look for patterns in what each patient says and for signs of feelings of which the patient is more or less unaware. They then engage their patients (who are increasingly aware of these patterns and able to experience and articulate these feelings) in an inquiry about the reasons for them or motives behind them. The focus is on what the patients do not know—and do not want to know—about themselves and their inner life, including strategies for avoiding such knowledge and the consequences of these strategies.
The goal of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is to extend the realm of what patients permit themselves to experience. It tries to mitigate the misery that patients with a neurotic, character, or personality disorder inflict on themselves.
The case-study method is characteristic of psychoanalytic research. The arguments that can be used in case studies are analogy (the use of familiar or homely models in which postulated causes and mechanisms can be shown to exist); consilience (the convergence of inferences from different kinds of information on a common cause); and abduction (inference to the best explanation). See Psychotherapy
As a therapy psychoanalysis is a lengthy process, taking perhaps several years, and a practitioner has to undergo a course of psychoanalysis himself or herself before being considered qualified to practise. The aim is to gain a full understanding of how one's current behaviour was developed as a result of past experiences, especially those of early childhood. These early experiences have to be brought to consciousness and confronted, leading to CATHARSIS, or a release of energy, with the result that the personality becomes freer, less restricted by having to control the energies of the ID, or operate under over-strict demands of the SUPEREGO.
In psychiatric practice, 100 years after its original development, the method is found to be most useful for neurotic disorders in patients who are highly motivated to recover and of good educational background as self-insight and an interest in the theoretical basis appear to be involved in a positive outcome. It has sometimes been criticized as having no better record for recovery than time alone (Eysenck, 1961), and is lengthy and expensive.
As a wider psychosocial theory, psychoanalysis has been influential (if controversial) in sociology and, more generally, in social theory (e.g. MARCUSE, structuralist theorists such as LACAN, PSYCHOHISTORY). Psychoanalytic theories have been especially influential recently in FEMINISM, FEMINIST THEORY and FEMINIST PSYCHOLOGY, although these theories constitute a major reworking of Freudian theory, especially in questioning the centrality of the symbolism of the phallus within Freud's writing and the problem that this presents for a genuinely feminist psychoanalytic theory (see CHODOROW, CIXOUS, KRISTEVA).
a method of psychotherapy and a psychological theory that focuses on unconscious mental processes and motivations. Psychoanalysis was developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the Austrian physician S. Freud. As a specific theory and method of psychotherapy, it should be distinguished from Freudianism, which elevates the tenets of psychoanalysis to the level of philosophical and anthropological principles.
Some of the tenets of psychoanalysis are encountered in the work of J.-M. Charcot and P. Janet (the psychological theory of neuroses). As early as 1882, the Viennese psychiatrist J. Breuer showed that a severe form of hysteria can be cured if the patient is hypnotized and compelled to recall and abreact the forgotten traumatic situation that caused the neurosis. Subsequently, Freud replaced hypnosis with the method of free association, which became the basis of the psychoanalytic technique. It was found that traumatic events, affective experiences, unfulfilled desires, and so on do not disappear from the mind but are repressed—that is, actively displaced from the conscious to the unconscious, where, often masked or “coded” in neurotic symptoms, they continue to have an active influence on the mind. In psychoanalysis, neurotic symptoms are regarded as compromises arising from the conflict between repressed desires and an internal “censor,” which acts as the conscious ego’s defense mechanism against dangerous desires and impulses. Psychoanalysis views dreams, mistakes (slips of the tongue and pen), and jokes as similar types of compromises. These observations drew psychoanalysis beyond the framework of psychiatry and made it possible to establish the connection between normal and pathological phenomena of the psyche. Psychoanalysis uncovered such psychological mechanisms as symbolization, displacement, and condensation in both normal and pathological phenomena.
From the standpoint of psychoanalysis, three aspects of every psychological phenomenon must be examined: the dynamic, the energetic, and the structural. The dynamic aspect is uncovered as a result of the interaction and conflict between different psychological forces. The energetic aspect of a psychological phenomenon means the distribution of bound and free energy in a given process. (By analogy with physical energy, psychoanalysis introduced the concept of a quantum of mental energy and its “charges”—cathexes, and modes of distributing and transferring mental energy.)
The theory of different forms and manifestations of mental energy, with an emphasis on sexual desires (the libido), was elaborated during the first stage of the development of psychoanalysis (the 1890’s and the early 20th century). The theory of the structure of the psyche was developed later (S. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 1921). The most archaic, impersonal, and entirely unconscious part of the psyche was called the id—a reservoir of mental energy, a “seething cauldron” of desires pressing for immediate satisfaction. This part of the psyche is associated with the somatic area, which serves as the source of energy for the desires. The id has no contact with the external world and does not know the difference between external reality and the subjective sphere.
The second structure of the psyche, the conscious ego, is formed as an “impression” of external reality on the initial mass of desires and impulses. Psychoanalysis attaches special importance to identification as a factor in shaping the ego, which is an intermediary between the external world and the id, between desire and satisfaction. The ego is guided not by the principle of satisfaction but by the demands of reality. It restrains the irrational impulses of the id, using a variety of defense mechanisms based on repression, including projection, reaction formation, and reversal. In reaction formation, a phenomenon based on ambivalent desires, a desire is replaced in the conscious by its opposite but retains its initial character in the unconscious (for example, unconscious love is manifested as conscious hatred, and cruelty as extreme kindness). In reversal, desire is directed initially at an external object and then turned against the self, under the influence of fear.
The third structure of the psyche, the superego, develops as a result of the introjection of social norms and educational prohibitions and reinforcement. It is the source of the individual’s moral attitudes. The superego usually functions unconsciously, but it is manifested in the conscious as the conscience. The stresses caused by the superego in the psyche are perceived as feelings of fear, guilt, depression, and inferiority. The psyche functions as a whole as soon as the superego is formed.
Psychoanalysis became increasingly well-known in Europe after the founding of the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1910. (The journal Imago was first published in 1912, and the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, in 1913.) After World War I (1914–18), psychoanalysis became very popular in Europe. Founded in 1920 in Berlin, the Institute of Psychoanalysis trained physicians to be analysts. When the fascists took power in 1933, psychoanalysis was banned in Germany. In 1938 it was banned in Austria. Subsequently, psychoanalysis developed rapidly in Great Britain and especially in the USA, where most of the European psychoanalysts emigrated. About three-fourths of all the literature on psychoanalysis is published in the USA, where there are more than 20 teaching and research institutes.
Psychoanalysis was the point of departure for the development of diverse trends in depth psychology. The internal contradictions in the thinking of Freud and his followers gave rise to new schools and approaches, including A. Adler’s individual psychology and C. G. Jung’s analytical psychology. Ego psychology (H. Hartmann), which asserts the relative autonomy of the conscious ego, developed as a counterweight to the one-sided orientation toward the unconscious processes. After World War II (1939–45) the development of European psychoanalysis was substantially influenced by the idealist philosophy of existentialism, phenomenology, neo-Thomism, and neo-Freudianism (in the USA). Attempts to use the psychoanalytic method are characteristic of several modernistic trends in 20th-century art and literature, including the stream-of-consciousness school and surrealism.
Soviet psychology acknowledges that psychoanalysis has introduced into science a number of important phenomena of the human psyche, such as unconscious processes and motives and the influence of early childhood experiences on the formation and pathological deformation of character. Nevertheless, Soviet psychology criticizes psychoanalysis for reducing diverse, changeable relations between unconscious higher nervous activity and the activity of the consciousness to a primitive antagonism between the conscious and the unconscious. In addition, psychoanalysis is criticized by Soviet psychology for universalizing psychoanalytic concepts and mechanically transferring them to the sphere of social phenomena, thus contributing to the psychologization of human society, the personality, and culture.
M. N. EPSHTEIN