What is Psychoanalysis and who is associated with it?
Psychoanalysis was founded by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Freud believed that people could be cured by making conscious their unconscious thoughts and motivations, gaining insight.
Through his clinical work with patients suffering from mental illness, Freud came to believe that childhood experiences and unconscious desires influenced behavior. Based on his observations, he developed a theory that described development in terms of a series of psychosexual stages. According to Freud, conflicts that occur during each of these stages can have a lifelong influence on personality and behavior. The goal of psychoanalysis is to help the client uncover and resolve unconscious conflicts and to strengthen the ego by redirecting energy to the conscious processes. Present-day psychoanalysts identify four purposes of the analytic methods including: uncover inner problems that are disguised as symptoms, promote client integration, uncover sources of pain in the client’s history that are likely to creep into the present, and discover what stands in the way of taking appropriate actions for the self.
Psychoanalytic theory was an enormously influential force during the first half of the twentieth century. Those inspired and influenced by Freud went on to expand upon Freud's ideas and develop theories of their own. Erik Erikson's ideas have become perhaps the best known. Erikson's eight-stage theory of psychosocial development describes growth and change throughout the lifespan, focusing on social interaction and conflicts that arise during different stages of development. Along with Erikson, Carl Jung and Alfred Adler were a part of discussing psychoanalytic ideas.
Techniques associated with Psychoanalysis:
Free Association- A client is asked to freely share thoughts, random words, and anything else that comes to mind, regardless of how coherent or appropriate the thoughts are.
Interpretation- The early part in therapy in which the information exchanged stays at the surface level, the deep unconscious material is addressed later in the therapy.
Analysis of the resistance- Something that gets in the way of the progress during treatment. (Ex: Forgetting appointments or having nothing to say).
Dream Analysis- The process of explaining the meaning of the way the unconscious thoughts and emotions are processed in the mind during sleep. Manifest: the content that the dreamer reports. Latent: the hidden meaning of one’s unconscious thoughts, drives, and desires.
Analysis of the Transference- The unconscious redirection of feelings from one person to another.
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