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- National Center for Biotechnology Information - Psychoanalytic Therapy (Nov. 01, 2026)
psychoanalysis
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What is psychoanalysis?
Psychoanalysis is a method for treating mental disorders, developed by Sigmund Freud. It emphasizes unconscious mental processes and is sometimes called "depth psychology". Freud's work, initially with Josef Breuer, involved using hypnosis to help patients bring repressed experiences and emotions into consciousness, leading to improvement.
Freud developed the technique of free association, encouraging patients to speak freely without censorship. He concluded that painful experiences, often sexual in nature, were repressed, leading to anxiety and symptoms that acted as defense mechanisms. Psychoanalysis also involves the study of dreams and the interpretation of patient "resistances" and "transference". This approach laid the foundation for modern psychotherapy by highlighting the significance of unconscious factors in mental illness.
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Who started psychoanalysis?
The field of psychoanalysis was pioneered by Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud. He developed psychoanalysis as a method for treating mental disorders, emphasizing the role of unconscious mental processes. Freud's work, often referred to as "depth psychology," originated from his clinical observations and theories about motivation, mental illness, and the structure of the subconscious. He introduced techniques such as free association to uncover repressed material from the unconscious mind.
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What does psychoanalytic theory say about the mind?
Psychoanalytic theory, pioneered by Sigmund Freud, posits that the mind is comprised of three agencies: the id, ego, and superego. The id represents primitive instincts, the ego mediates reality, and the superego embodies moral standards. Much of mental activity occurs on an unconscious level, driven by repressed desires and conflicts, particularly those related to sex and aggression. These unconscious forces can manifest as defense mechanisms, such as repression, reaction formation, and projection, which help manage anxiety and maintain self-esteem. The goal of psychoanalysis is to bring these unconscious processes into conscious awareness to resolve mental disorders.
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What is the unconscious mind in psychoanalysis?
In psychoanalysis, the unconscious mind refers to mental activities that occur without an individual's awareness. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, proposed that these unconscious processes significantly influence behavior, even if the person cannot consciously report them. Freud believed that dreams and slips of the tongue were manifestations of unconscious content that was too threatening to be confronted directly.
Freud distinguished between conscious, preconscious, and unconscious levels of awareness. While conscious activities are in the immediate field of awareness, and preconscious data can be easily recalled, unconscious data is difficult to access but may surface later, sometimes under specific conditions like hypnosis. Psychoanalytic theory suggests that many neurotic symptoms stem from conflicts repressed from consciousness.
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How does psychoanalysis use dream interpretation?
Psychoanalysis, particularly through the work of Sigmund Freud, views dreams as a crucial pathway to understanding the unconscious mind. Freud proposed that dreams are disguised wish fulfillments, where repressed desires, often sexual or aggressive in nature, are expressed in a symbolic and distorted form to bypass the mind's censorship during sleep.
The process of dream interpretation involves analyzing the dream's manifest content (what is remembered) to uncover its latent meaning (the underlying wishes). Key mechanisms of this "dreamwork" include condensation (fusing multiple ideas into one), displacement (shifting emotional significance from one element to another), representation (transforming thoughts into images), and secondary revision (adding narrative coherence upon waking). By using techniques like free association, where patients express random thoughts about the dream, analysts aim to decode these symbols and bring repressed conflicts to consciousness, facilitating therapeutic progress.
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What are defense mechanisms in psychoanalysis?
In psychoanalytic theory, defense mechanisms are unconscious mental processes that help individuals cope with internal conflicts and anxiety. These mechanisms create compromise solutions by concealing unacceptable drives or feelings, thereby protecting self-esteem.
Key defense mechanisms include:
* Repression: Pushing unwanted ideas or impulses into the unconscious.
* Reaction formation: Behaving in a way that is the opposite of an unconscious impulse.
* Projection: Attributing one's own unacceptable feelings to others.
* Regression: Returning to earlier developmental stages during times of stress.
* Sublimation: Redirecting instinctual drives into socially acceptable activities.
* Denial: Refusing to acknowledge painful realities.
* Rationalization: Creating logical-sounding excuses for unacceptable behavior.While normal aspects of personality, an excessive reliance on these defenses can be indicative of psychological distress.
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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.
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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.
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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.