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 Sigmund Freud, whose work stemmed partly from the clinical work of Josef Breuer and others. Freud developed and refined the theory and practice of psychoanalysis until his death in 1939. In an encyclopedic article, he identified the cornerstones of psychoanalysis as "the assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the recognition of the theory of repression and resistance, the appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus complex." Freud's colleagues Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung developed offshoots of psychoanalysis which they called individual psychology (Adler) and analytical psychology (Jung), although Freud himself wrote a number of criticisms of them and emphatically denied that they were forms of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was later developed in different directions by neo-Freudian thinkers, such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan. Jacques Lacan's theory essentially represents a return to Freud. He described Freudian metapsychology as a technical elaboration of the three-instance model of the psyche and primarily examined the logical structure of the unconscious.

Freud distinguished between the conscious and unconscious realms of the psyche and held the view that the contents of unconscious largely determine cognition and behaviour. He found that many of the drives - which according to his structural model are located in the ‘id’ - are repressed into the unconscious due to traumatic experiences during childhood and that the attempt to integrate them into the ego's conscious perception triggers resistance. This and other defense mechanisms strive to maintain the repression; this is accompanied by conflicts between the unconscious drive parts and the conscious material and can lead to mental disturbances. Freud also discovered that the drive desires repressed into the unconscious reveal themselves particularly in the symbols of dreams, furtherhin in the symptoms of neurotis and Freudian slips. Psychoanalysis, or simply analytical therapy, was developed in order to clarify the causes of the disorders diagnostically and to restore mental health on the basis of this insights. This is possible by enabling the conscious to become aware of the id's needs that have been repressed into the unconscious and to find a realistic solution to resolve the conflicts. Freud summarised this goal of therapy in his demand ‘Where id was, ego shall became.’

Freud attached great importance to the consistency of his structural model and its compatibility with the findings of biology, including a well-founded theory of healthy human development, which is naturally completed in three successive stages: the oral, anal and genital phases. Psychoanalysts place large emphasis on experiences of early childhood and abolition of infantile amnesia. During therapy, a psychoanalyst aims to induce transference, whereby patients relive their infantile conflicts by projecting onto the analyst feelings of love, dependence and anger.

During psychoanalytic sessions a patient traditionally lies on a couch, and an analyst sits just behind and out of sight. The patient expresses their thoughts, including free associations, fantasies, and dreams, from which the analyst infers the unconscious conflicts causing the patient's symptoms and character problems. Through the analysis of these conflicts, which includes interpreting the transference and countertransference (the analyst's feelings for the patient), the analyst confronts the patient's pathological defence mechanisms to help patients understand themselves better. This includes not least the fact that the neurlogical branch of psychoanalysis which can be traced back to Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology has recently provided evidence that the brain stores experiences in specialised neuronal networks (memory function of the superego) and the ego focuses the highest forms of its conscious thinking in the frontal lobe.

Psychoanalysis has been a controversial discipline from the outset and its effectiveness as a treatment remains contested, although its influence on psychology and psychiatry is undisputed. Psychoanalytical concepts are also widely used outside the therapeutic field, for example in film and literary criticism, analysis of fairy tales, philosophical perspectives such as Freudo-Marxism and other cultural phenomena. Provided by Wikipedia