psychoanalysis
n. an approach to the mind, personality, psychological disorders, and psychological treatment originally developed by Sigmund Freud at the beginning of the 20th century. The hallmark of psychoanalysis is the assumption that much mental activity is unconscious and that understanding people requires interpreting the unconscious meaning underlying their overt, or manifest, behavior. Psychoanalysis (often shortened to analysis) focuses primarily, then, on the influence of such unconscious forces as repressed impulses, internal conflicts, and childhood traumas on the mental life and adjustment of the individual. The foundations on which classical psychoanalysis rests are (a) the concept of infantile sexuality; (b) the Oedipus complex; (c) the theory of instincts or drives; (d) the pleasure principle and the reality principle; (e) the threefold structure of the psyche into id,
ego, and superego; and (f) the central importance of anxiety and defense mechanisms in neurotic reactions. By contrast, contemporary psychoanalysis and other forms such as object relations theory, self psychology, and relational psychoanalysis share a belief in a dynamic unconscious but with minimal or no attention directed to drives or to structural theory. Psychoanalysis as a therapy seeks to bring about basic modifications in an individual’s personality by investigating his or her transference with the analyst or therapist and thereby eliciting and interpreting the unconscious conflicts that have produced the individual’s neurosis. The specific methods used to achieve this goal are free association, dream analysis, analysis of resistances and defenses, and working through the feelings revealed in the transference and countertransference process. Also
called Freudian approach; Freudianism. See also analytic psychology; ego psychology; individual psychology; neo-Freudian. —psychoanalytic
adj.