Difference between revisions of "Psychoanalysis"

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[[Freud]] describes [[psychoanalysis]] as comprising:
 
[[Freud]] describes [[psychoanalysis]] as comprising:
  

Revision as of 15:41, 28 August 2006

French: psychanalyse


Freud describes psychoanalysis as comprising:

  1. a discipline founded on a procedure for the investigation of mental processes that are otherwise inaccessible because they are unconscious;
  1. a therapeutic method for the treatment of neurotic disorders; and
  1. a body of psychological data evolving into a new scientific discipline.

Freud's third and broadest category comprises his work on culture (which is based largely on the view that culture is a product of the diversion or sublimation of sexual energy) and art, which provides the starting-point for the many varieties of psychoanalytic criticism.

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Although the history of psychoanalysis is inseparable from that of Freud's life and of the long self-analysis which led him to write his great Interpretation of Dreams (1900), it is clear that his new science is rooted in the traditions of nineteenth-century psychology and biology.

Freud's ventures into anthropology, which he views as an integral part of his new scientific discipline, are also influenced by nineteenth-century theories of evolution and by their attendant eurocentrism; hence the analogy between the "mental life of savages and neurotics" posited in Totem and Taboo (1913), and the argument that the life of an indiviudal re-enacts or repeats the life of the species.

It is also clear that Freud's descriptions of the workings of the unconscious, with it s flows of energy, and of libido and its mechanisms of discharge, owe much to the physics and hydraulics of his age.

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Freud constantly revises and reworks his theories, and all the modifications he introduces are closely related to developments at the clinical elevel as he gradually abandons the therapeutic technique of hypnosis and catharsis in avor of the talking cure, and moves from his early seduction theory of hysteria to a theory of both neurosis and normal development that is based upon the discovery of the Oedipus complex and its vital importance in psychosexual development.

Yet despite all the changes that are introduced, there is a constant emphasis on the [[unconscious and on sexuality, defined in such broad terms as to include the oral and anal dimensions and not merely the narrowly genital or procreative dimension.

It is the emphasis on sexuality that leads to the major disagreements between Freud and Jung, whom the former at one point regarded as his crown prince.

Freud's theories are obviously not beyond criticism, but they have had an incalculable impact on the twentieth-century vision of sexuality, not least by insisting the children are not asexual and have a sexual life of their own.[1]

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The best account of the gradual development of the technique of psychoanalysis is that provided by Freud himself in his correspondence iwth Wilhelm Fliess, the ear, nost and throat specialist with whom he collaborated in the 1980s, in the studies n hysteria coauthored with Breuer, and in the five published case studies.

The technique that evolved is the method of free association, with the patient or anlaysand lying on a couch and with the analyst sitting slightly to the rear and out of eyeshot.

The patient is required to tell everything and omit nothing; the analyst to listen to everything and to privilege nothing.

Free association around dreams or memories allows unconscious chains of fantasies and wishes to be reconstructed and then interpreted so as to uncover underlying structures, which, typically, relate to the Oedipus complex and repressed childhood memories, usually with a sexual content.

Although dreams are described by Freud as "the royal road to the unconscious," (1900) it should be noted that the psychoanalyst's raw material is not the unconscious itself (which is by definition inaccesible), but material that has already been shaped by the dream-work.

The central factor in the analytic treatment is the transference that allows unconscious or repressed material to be reactualized in verbal form rather than reproduced in symptoms, and projected onto the analyst.

In a classic Freudian psychoanalysis, the analysand has daily sessions of analysis, each lasting fifty minutes (the so-called 'analytic hour'); the payment of fees is held to have great symbolic importance.

Freud never claimed that his method was a universal panacea, but once remarked with typically pessimistic wit that it could transform "hysterical misery" into "common unhappiness."[2]

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Although psychoanalysis is widely practiced and has had an important influence on related therapeutic methods, it has never been defined in either medical or legal terms.

The profession is self-regulated and its standards of practice are defined by the various national associaitons recognized by the International Psycho-Analytical Association.

The would-be psychoanalyst undertakes a personal analysis before embarking upon a rigorous training analysis designed to promote a recognition of the importance of transference and countertransference.

Qualified analysts normally work under the supervision of their seniors, and usually undetake at least one "second analysis."

The first generation of psychoanalysts were, like Freud himself, doctors of medicine, but suitably qualified non-medical or lay analysts were admitted to the profession from the 1920s onwards.<ref.Freud. 1926a.</ref>

The desirability or otherwise of medical qualifications is a matter for the various national associations.

The question of the scientific nature of psychoanalysis remains controversial.


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Freud's own career was punctuated by a series of breaks with oleagues to whom he had once been close, and the history of the psychoanalytic movement is one of splits and schisms as well as of international expansion.

All the major tendencies within contemporary psychoanalysis claim a Freudian ancestry, but take as their stating-point different periods in his work or different aspects of his theories.

Very schematically, the main post-Freudian currents within psychoanalysi are ego-psychology, Kleinian psychoanalysis, object-relations theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

  1. 1905a. 1908a.
  2. 1893-5.