Psychoanalysis

Encyclopedia articles

  • Transference — The unconscious redirection of feelings and expectations from past relationships onto a new person — for example, a therapist. A key concept in psychoanalysis.
  • Countertransference — The therapist's emotional reaction to a client, shaped by the therapist's own experience. Used as a tool for understanding the client.
  • Defense mechanisms — Unconscious mental processes that reduce anxiety and protect self-esteem. Examples: repression, projection, rationalization, denial.
  • Attachment — The emotional bond between a child and a significant caregiver (J. Bowlby). Attachment style influences adult relationships.
  • Narcissism — In the clinical sense — a persistent pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and empathy deficit. Differs from healthy self-regard.
  • Setting — The conditions of psychological work: time, place, duration, rules. A stable setting creates a safe space for therapy.
  • Repression — Involuntary exclusion of painful thoughts, memories, or desires from consciousness. The most fundamental defense mechanism according to Freud.
  • Projection — Unconscious attribution of one's own unacceptable feelings, impulses, or thoughts to another person.
  • Rationalization — Unconscious justification of actions, thoughts, or feelings with logical or socially acceptable explanations that conceal the true motivations.
  • Denial — Unconscious refusal to acknowledge a painful or threatening reality despite clear evidence. One of the most primitive defense mechanisms.
  • Sublimation — Channeling of unacceptable impulses into socially valued activities — art, science, sport. Considered the most mature and adaptive defense mechanism.
  • Displacement — Redirection of an emotion or impulse from its original object to a less threatening substitute. For example, anger at a boss expressed as irritability with family.
  • Psychodynamic Therapy — Therapeutic approach rooted in the psychoanalytic tradition that explores unconscious conflicts, relational patterns, and transference to promote psychological change.
  • The Unconscious — The domain of psychic life containing thoughts, memories, desires, and impulses inaccessible to ordinary awareness yet profoundly influencing behavior.
  • Free Association — The fundamental psychoanalytic technique in which the patient verbalizes everything that comes to mind without censorship or selection.
  • Resistance — Psychic forces that oppose the progress of therapeutic treatment and the awareness of unconscious material.
  • Object relations theory — Psychoanalytic school emphasizing internalized relationships with significant objects as the foundation of psychic structure. Includes contributions from Klein, Winnicott, Fairbairn, and Kernberg.
  • Reaction Formation — Defense mechanism by which an unacceptable impulse is transformed into its opposite. Hatred becomes excessive love, forbidden desire becomes ostentatious rejection.
  • Intellectualization — Excessive use of abstract thinking to avoid contact with painful emotions. The person analyzes, theorizes, and rationalizes instead of feeling.
  • Splitting — Division of representations of self and others into 'all-good' and 'all-bad' categories, without the capacity to integrate positive and negative aspects into a single image.
  • Projective Identification — Unconscious process in which a person projects intolerable parts of themselves into another person, who then behaves in accordance with what has been projected. Goes beyond simple projection.

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