Based on Charles Rycroft’s useful
A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis.
ABREACTION: process of releasing repressed emotion by reliving in imagination the original experience.
AFFECT: feeling or emotion attached to ideas, idea-clusters or objects.
AGGRESSION: in Freud’s later writings a derivative of the Death Instinct, contrasted to libido, sex or the Life Instinct, Eros. Opinions differ whether aggression is a basic instinctual drive or whether it provides the ego with energy to overcome obstacles in the way of satisfying self-assertive drives.
CATHEXIS: accumulation or quantity of mental energy attaching to some idea, memory or object.
COMPLEX: cluster of ideas (and often memories of real or imaginary experiences) associated with powerful emotions which become buried by the process of repression in the unconscious part of mind and exert a dynamic effect on behaviour. Can sometimes emerge partly or wholly into the conscious mind, although it is the job of repression to prevent this.
Freud recognized only two: the Oedipus (or Oedipal) and Castration complexes.
Oedipus complex: emerges during the phase of ego development between the ages of 3 and 5 and can later be responsible for much unconscious guilt. Persons fixated at the Oedipal level show it in many ways, for example, by choosing sexual partners who resemble their parent(s).
Castration complex: Oedipal rivalry with fathers causes castration anxiety in males. Girls and women cannot suffer this male anxiety. But they too can feel ‘castrated,’ wish to prove they possess an adequate (symbolic) substitute for the penis; or feel anxiety toward whatever organ, object or activity is a penis-equivalent for them. The origin of this complex is related by Freud to penis-envy. Much criticized by feminists.
DEATH INSTINCT or THANATOS: different from aggressive wish to kill others; rather, the individual’s own innate self-destructive drive. Freud distinguished 2 kinds of instincts. Sexual ones (Eros) which perpetually attempt and achieve the renewal of life. Another which seeks to lead what is living to death. Not supported by any known biological principle.
DEFENCE: negatively, its function is to protect the ego which may be threatened by anxieties from (a) the id, super-ego or outside world, (b) bad conscience or super-ego threats, (c) real dangers. Positively, defence mechanisms are used by the ego to channel or control the forces which may lead to neurosis. Defense acts as a compromise between wish and reality. The ego modifies the id’s urges for immediate gratification and allows disguised satisfaction. The point of any defensive compromise is to keep the conflicts it resolves out of conscious awareness.
DISPLACEMENT: shifting of affect from one mental image to another to which it does not really belong, as in dreams.
DREAM WORK: (a) the function of dreams is to preserve sleep by representing wishes as fulfilled which would otherwise wake the dreamer, (b) The manifest content of dreams starts from various sensory experiences received during sleep, plus worries of the previous day and recent past life, (c) Latent repressed wishes from the unconscious attach themselves to this content. To evade censorship and prevent the sleeper from waking, these latent wishes modify or disguise their content. This modification taking place in the unconscious is the dream work.
EGO, ID, SUPER-EGO: structural concepts; ‘places’ (topography) within the psychic apparatus; but not actually ‘located’ in the brain.
Psyche (mental apparatus) begins as unorganized id (“everything present at birth”) out of which a structured ego develops. Infancy progresses through the libido phases (oral, anal, phallic, Oedipal) in which the id’s sources and forms of sexual pleasure change.
Paralleling these phases, the ego develops functions enabling the individual to master impulses, operate independently of parental figures and control environment.
Part of the ego develops the self-critical activities of the super-ego which depend on the introjection of parental figures. The severity of the super-ego partly derives from the violence of the subject’s own unconscious feelings in early infancy. The energies of the super-ego may also derive from the id: the self-attacking tendency of the super-ego provides an outlet for the subject’s aggressive impulses. Super-ego contains both the infantile past and a higher level of the ego’s self-reflective functions.
FIXATION: failure to progress adequately through the stages of libidinal development can cause fixation: attachment to objects appropriate to those earlier infantile stages. Fixated persons suffer frustrating wastes of energy because of their over-investment in past objects.
GUILT: specifically neurotic guilt, i.e., experiences of feeling guilty which cannot be explained by real violations of the patient’s conscious values. Result of conflicts between super-ego and infantile sexual and aggressive wishes. Expressions of aggressive feeling taken out on oneself through the super-ego’s ‘moral’ condemnation. Defences to reduce anxiety can also reduce guilt.
HYSTERIA: illness once considered as either (a) physical in origin, or (b) in which physical evidence of illness was absent. Since Charcot, and especially psychoanalysis, seen as neurotic forms of behaviour in which the physical symptoms (e.g., convulsions, paralysis, disturbances of sight, hearing, etc.) derive from psychological malfunctions. Hysteria was diagnosed as a purely female or ‘uterine’ disease. Freud rejected this but kept the idea that it was somehow connected to sexuality. The 2 recognized forms of hysteria are: (a) conversion-hysteria, a form of psychoneurosis in which symptoms appear as physical complaints, as in Anna O’s case; and (b) anxiety-hysteria, now known as phobia, as in Little Hans’s case.
The symptom of phobia is extreme neurotic anxiety experienced in certain situations (e.g., claustrophobia, anxiety in enclosed spaces) or when faced with certain objects (e.g., spiders, snakes or horses, as in Hans’s case).
A person with a phobic character has the habit of dealing with situations that are likely to cause anxiety or conflict either (a) by rigidly avoiding them, or (b) by seeking and taking pleasure in activities which are dangerous and normally arouse anxiety in others.
IMPULSE: in neurology refers to the wave of electrical charge passing along a nerve fibre. Freud also described movements of psychic energy in this way: instinctual impulses ‘travel’ from the id along channels to the ego where these are either (a) discharged in action, (b) inhibited, (c) directed by defence mechanisms or (d) sublimated.
INHIBITION: a process is inhibited if it is ‘switched off’ by the operation of some other process. So fear can inhibit sexual desire, etc. Inhibiting agencies are usually the ego or super-ego; the inhibited process is usually an instinctual impulse. Inhibition can be seen as a symptom.
INSTINCT: innate biological drive to action; has (a) a biological source and (b) a supply of energy; (c) its aim is satisfaction which (d) it seeks in objects. Failure to find satisfaction or objects causes frustration and increases of instinctual tension experienced as pain. This pain (according to the Pleasure Principle) must seek relief and leads to the triggering of defence mechanisms to reduce tension. Anxiety is the ego’s way of reacting to instinctual tension which stimulates its defences. Freud claimed an instinct can undergo 4 changes: (a) repression, (b) sublimation, (c) turning against the self (using the self as an instinctual object), (d) reversal (into its opposite, e.g., replacing an active role by a passive one).
INTROJECTION: process by which relationship with an object (out there) is replaced by one with an imagined mental object (in here). Super-ego is formed by introjection of parental/authority figures. Introjection is both a defence (against anxiety caused by separation) and a normal development (helps the subject to become autonomous).
LIBIDO: sexual desire; vital impulse or energy. Hypothetical form of mental energy flowing into psychic processes, structures and objects. The proposed source of libido is the body or id; exists as related to specific erotogenic zones or libidinized psychic structures.
Freud first thought of libido as energy attached to specific sexual instincts. Later, narcissistic libido was seen as invested in the ego, i.e., libido originally attached to parent objects, because of frustration, becomes attached to the ego. Self-love, self-awareness increases as attachment to parents decreases. Ego, by this, becomes its own object.
NEUROSIS: originally a disease of the nerves; later describing diseases due to functional disturbances of the nervous system unaccompanied by structural changes. Freud’s discovery is that neurosis is a disorder of the personality, not a disease of the nervous system; a conflict phenomenon involving the thwarting of some fundamental instinctual urge.
There are several types of neuroses: due to past causes; present sexual habits; shock; symptoms as character traits; psychosomatic. Example: obsessional neurosis. Obsessions are ideas or groups of ideas persistently intruding upon the patient’s consciousness involuntarily despite the recognition of their abnormality. Major symptoms are obsessional thoughts and compulsive ritual behaviour. Such thoughts differ from normal ones because the patient experiences them as bizarre, obscene, unspontaneous, repetitive; and behaviour is also repetitive, stereotyped, bound. Obsessional neurosis centres on regression to the anal-sadistic stage and ambivalence toward introjected parents.
PSYCHE: originally the ‘soul’; psychologically, the mind, mental apparatus. Usually contrasted with soma, the body, or general physical factors.
PSYCHIATRY: branch of medicine treating mental illnesses. Unlike psychoanalysis (the theory and therapeutic treatment of neuroses) psychiatry (a) treats illnesses of known physical origin, e.g., senility, mental deficiency, etc.; (b) employs different techniques such as electro-shock therapy and drugs; and (c) tends to regard mental illness as due to physical factors, known or unknown.
Psychology is defined as ‘science of mind’ or today ‘science of behaviour’ and has many specialized branches: experimental, social, animal, industrial, etc. Psychoanalysis may be regarded as one such branch.
PSYCHOSIS: used by both psychiatry and psychoanalysis to describe mental illnesses which may lead to total loss of reality and control over behaviour; contrasted to neurosis in which the patient’s sanity is never in doubt. Psychiatry distinguishes between organic psychosis due to demonstrable organic disease and functional psychoses without apparent organic origin. The 3 functional psychoses recognized by both branches are schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis and paranoia. Psychoanalysis considers psychosis as a narcissistic disorder inaccessible to treatment because transference cannot be formed.
REGRESSION: as a result of fixation, reversion to expressive channels of libidinal and ego development belonging to infantile stages. Also a defensive process seeking to avoid anxiety by a return to earlier patterns of behaviour: not a viable defence since regression compels the individual to re-experience anxiety appropriate to the regressed stage.
Free association can be seen as a ‘controlled’ therapeutic form of regression useful in the working out of neurosis.
REPRESSION: defence mechanism by which unacceptable impulse or idea is rendered unconscious. Mental process arising from conflicts between the Pleasure and Reality Principles. Impulses, memories and painful emotions arising from such conflicts, and thrust into the unconscious, still remain active, indirectly influencing experience and behaviour, producing neurotic symptoms and also determining (normal) dreams. Ego development depends on repression.
RESISTANCE: opposition to the analyst’s interpretation during the psychoanalytical process of making unconscious patterns conscious.
SEXUALITY: Freud upset traditional ideas of sex by asserting that (a) adult sexual behaviour has infantile origins (oral, anal erotism and component instincts) which contribute to the development of the adult sexual instinct and personality as a whole; that (b) infantile and adult sexual drives influence non-sexual behaviour as filtered through symbolization and sublimation.
SUBLIMATION: psychic development by which instinctual energies are discharged in non-instinctual forms of behaviour. Displacement of such energy to ones of less instinctual interest; desexualized or deaggressified emotion; liberation of activity from demands of instinctual tension. Can perhaps best be understood negatively: e.g. a patient who before his neurotic breakdown had an inquiring (‘devouring’) mind now turned to over-eating (oral regression); or one with previous intellectual curiosity turned to voyeurism. These examples suggest that the instincts available for sublimation are the pregenital component instincts. Sublimation depends on unconscious SYMBOLIZATION: “only what is repressed is symbolized; only what is repressed needs to be symbolized,” Ernest Jones (1916); and ego development depends on sublimation.
SYMPTOM: effect of a compromise between repressed wish and repressing agency (ego, super-ego). Symptom-formation in neurosis shares the characteristics of normal dream work.
TRANSFERENCE: displacement on to the analyst of feelings, ideas, which derive from the introjected figures or objects acquired in the patient’s past life. The analyst’s detachment (refusal to ‘play along’ or respond to the patient’s expectations) creates a novel or ‘second neurosis’ which it is possible to interpret as the patient behaving as though the analyst were a father, mother, brother, etc. This is the crucial transference-neurosis in which the conflict is worked through, unconscious patterns becoming conscious to the patient.
UNCONSCIOUS: can there be mental processes of which the subject is unaware? Are unconscious mental processes, by definition, self-contradictory? These are crucial questions/criticisms of psychoanalysis. Freud responds by assuming 2 kinds of unconscious processes: those which can become conscious easily; others subject to repression. Some things can be easily recalled; others, such as some fantasies, wishes, painful memories, exist but can only become conscious after the removal of specific resistances. On the evidence of the latter Freud bases his hypothesis of a dynamic unconscious.