Classical psychoanalysis
Freud and Classical Psychoanalysis
• Sigmund Freud
• Psychoanalysis was an innovative procedure
• Interpreting others and himself
• “The ego that it is not even master in its own house but must content itself with scanty
information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.”
• Freudian Slips (meaningless slips of the tongue)
• Dreams
Mapping out the mind
• Conscious
o The sensations, thoughts and experiences we are aware of at any given time.
• Preconscious
o Ideas, perceptions, memories and feelings that you can become aware of. We
can recall them quite easily by bringing them into the state of consciousness.
• Unconscious
o Unacceptable and therefore inaccessible ideas, perceptions, memories and
feelings that stay buried as they are a threat to the conscious mind.
Drive model
• Life drive (survival through procreation) or Death drive (destructive instincts and self-
destruction)
• They motivate us, they have different strengths and force
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Freud believed that humans operated according to two principles:
• Pleasure principle
o Getting all of ones gratifications instantly
o Pleasure seeking and pain avoidance
o When not acted upon they are repressed and pushed down into the
unconscious but they still continue to influence ones thoughts feelings
and behaviour.
• Reality principle
o Is that some of these gratifications are problematic according to society
and social norms
Development
• Orderly progression of bodily preoccupations
• Oral (0-1 years), Anal (1-3 years), Phallic (3-6 years), Genital (Puberty)
• Children start to replace the pleasure principle with the reality principle (which is
deemed socially acceptable
• Fixations can occur when a child will become stuck on a phase and can have long
terms affects which influence adulthood
Structure
Defence Mechanisms:
• The resistant force that keeps certain memories out of awareness.
• Manages the anxiety created by the ego negotiating between the ID and superego
• The strategies that the ego uses to defend against the conflict between drives and
moral codes.
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o Repression (the process of transferring unacceptable thoughts and drives)
o Resistance (where desires threaten to surface which causes anxiety and
reluctance about them surfacing)
o Denial
o Projection (changing the focus of drives and wishes you have onto other people)
o Reaction formation
o Rationalisation
Purpose of therapy:
• To remove defences to get to the unconscious
• Too much reliance
Techniques that can be used to gain insight into the unconscious. Making the
unconscious conflicts conscious
• Free association (lying on the couch and express whatever comes to mind
uncensored)
• Dream analysis
o Manifest content
o Latent content
• Resistance
• Transference and Countertransference
Criticisms
• Research and empirical validity
• Sex Drive
• Overly deterministic
Psychoanalysis and new directions
What has been left out?
• Freud lived in sexually repressive Victorian era.
• Psychoanalysis left out the concerns of poverty and females.
Psychodynamic therapies
• Helping the client to gain insight
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• Donald Winnicott: The unthinkable anxiety
• Wilfred Bion: The nameless dread
Freud’s mark on Psychology and the developments beyond
• M. Klein: Object relations
• Bowlby: Departure from classical Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysis in
attachment theory
• Kohut: Departure from classical psychoanalysis and the development of Self
psychology
The development of Kleinian Psychoanalysis
• Object and drives:
o Biological instinctual drives are not objectless. The relationship is important.
o That which will satisfy a need
o The significant person, part of the person (a mother's breast) or a symbol of
them that is the target of another’s feelings or drives
o A child deals with the drive by fantasizing.
• Representations and object relations
o Interpersonal relations
o Infants form object relations by projecting their feeling and energies outward
onto objects.
o The interactions are then taken back in (internalized) as internal objects,
representations or experiences of the relationship. They can be internalized as
good or bad. Gratified or denied.
o The internal objects stay with them and affect future interpersonal relations.
The development of attachment theory
• Bowlby was an independent thinker. He accepted certain psychoanalytic views and
rejected others.
• Psychoanalytic interviews needed to be supplemented with extra data
• Objective factors in a child’s early social environment play an important role.
• Separations between the mother and child.
• This lead to the development of his independent theory of Attachment.
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