Psychoanalysis | Definition, Theory, & Therapy | Britannica (original) (raw)

psychoanalysis, method of treating mental disorders, shaped by psychoanalytic theory, which emphasizes unconscious mental processes and is sometimes described as “depth psychology.” The psychoanalytic movement originated in the clinical observations and formulations of Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, who coined the term psychoanalysis. During the 1890s, Freud worked with Austrian physician and physiologist Josef Breuer in studies of neurotic patients under hypnosis. Freud and Breuer observed that, when the sources of patients’ ideas and impulses were brought into consciousness during the hypnotic state, the patients showed improvement.

(Read Sigmund Freud’s 1926 Britannica essay on psychoanalysis.)

Observing that most patients talked freely without being under hypnosis, Freud evolved the technique of free association of ideas. The patient was encouraged to say anything that came to mind, without regard to its assumed relevancy or propriety. Noting that patients sometimes had difficulty in making free associations, Freud concluded that certain painful experiences were repressed, or held back from conscious awareness. Freud noted that in the majority of the patients seen during his early practice, the events most frequently repressed were concerned with disturbing sexual experiences. Thus he hypothesized that anxiety was a consequence of the repressed energy (libido) attached to sexuality; the repressed energy found expression in various symptoms that served as psychological defense mechanisms. Freud and his followers later extended the concept of anxiety to include feelings of fear, guilt, and shame consequent to fantasies of aggression and hostility and to fear of loneliness caused by separation from a person on whom the sufferer is dependent.

Freud’s free-association technique provided him with a tool for studying the meanings of dreams, slips of the tongue, forgetfulness, and other mistakes and errors in everyday life. From these investigations he was led to a new conception of the structure of personality: the id, ego, and superego. The id is the unconscious reservoir of drives and impulses derived from the genetic background and concerned with the preservation and propagation of life. The ego, according to Freud, operates in conscious and preconscious levels of awareness. It is the portion of the personality concerned with the tasks of reality: perception, cognition, and executive actions. In the superego lie the individual’s environmentally derived ideals and values and the mores of family and society; the superego serves as a censor on the ego functions.

In the Freudian framework, conflicts among the three structures of the personality are repressed and lead to the arousal of anxiety. The person is protected from experiencing anxiety directly by the development of defense mechanisms, which are learned through family and cultural influences. These mechanisms become pathological when they inhibit pursuit of the satisfactions of living in a society. The existence of these patterns of adaptation or mechanisms of defense are quantitatively but not qualitatively different in the psychotic and neurotic states.

Freud held that the patient’s emotional attachment to the analyst represented a transference of the patient’s relationship to parents or important parental figures. Freud held that those strong feelings, unconsciously projected to the analyst, influenced the patient’s capacity to make free associations. By objectively treating these responses and the resistances they evoked and by bringing the patient to analyze the origin of those feelings, Freud concluded that the analysis of the transference and the patient’s resistance to its analysis were the keystones of psychoanalytic therapy.

Early schisms over such issues as the basic role that Freud ascribed to biological instinctual processes caused onetime associates Carl Jung, Otto Rank, and Alfred Adler to establish their own psychological theories. Other influential theorists, including some who introduced significant departures from Freudian theory or technique, included Melanie Klein, Karen Horney, Ronald Fairbairn, Harry Stack Sullivan, Donald Winnicott, Erich Fromm, Erik Erikson, and Heinz Kohut. At one time psychiatrists held a monopoly on psychoanalytic practice, but later nonmedical therapists also were admitted to psychoanalytic training institutes.

Later developments included work on the technique and theory of psychoanalysis of children, pioneered by Klein and Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud’s daughter. The Freudian tripartite division of the mind into id, ego, and superego became progressively more elaborate, problems of anxiety received increasing attention, and explorations of female sexuality were undertaken. Psychoanalysis also found many extraclinical applications in other areas of social thought, particularly anthropology and sociology, and in literature and the arts.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Brian Duignan.