Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis

Introduction

Psychoanalysis is the therapy of treating people who have emotional and mental disorders. This phenomenon involves a number of treatment sessions. The primary objective is to overcome those unconscious problems that resist the mental growth and result in mental sickness.

The theory of psychoanalysis was conceived by the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud in early 20th century. He was the founder of psychoanalysis. According to him, there is a deep down influence of one's unconscious mind on his behavior and personality. His therapy was used to explore unconscious mind, mental sickness, internal conflicts and anxieties.

Discussion

Sigmund Freud Psychoanalytic theory

He proposed the very first complete theory of personality. According to him, the person's behavior, actions and thoughts are the result of his unconscious motives and his childhood conflicts that remained unresolved (Liz, 2007). He proposed his theory to resolve those causes of behavior that are buried in the unconscious mind. His psychoanalytical model has three following components:

The Structure of Personality: The personality structure defines the development of the person through two elements. The first one is the conflict resolution between biological pulses or id. The second one is the social restraints that are ego and super ego (Myers, 2004).

Defense Mechanism: This is the protective method which reduces the anxiety through repression, regression, reaction formation, projection, rationalizing and displacement.

Psychosexual Stages: Freud believed that a person goes through various stages from childhood to adulthood. Failure at any stage can cause a lack that appears in even adulthood (Daniels, 2011).

Oral stages: the first stage where all the pleasure focuses on the mouth such as biting, chewing, sucking.

Anal stage (1-3 years): where center is on the anus where children are learnt to gain control over their excretory functions.

Phallic stage (3-5 years): important stage for a child where pleasure zone is genitals.

Latency (6-12 years): where children concentrate on becoming social and making friends.

Genital stage (12-puberty onwards): where sexual interest arises in adolescents.

Psychoanalytic techniques

Freud believed that the curative technique to come out of mental problems is to develop in-depth insight into the causes of those issues. The techniques proposed by Freud are as following:

Free Association: This is the primary technique which psychoanalysts use in psychotherapy which encourages a patient to reveal his unconscious contents. Here, patients are asked to say whatever is coming to their minds. Psychotherapists try to analyze the emotional temperature through this method. The other method was Freudian Slips in which tongue slips are analyzed to get a deep insight into the unconscious mind. This holds a significant importance in getting out the important information which a patient tries to hide consciously (McLeod, 2007).

Dream Analysis: Freud also believed that the dreams hold equally significant value in this therapy. Here therapists interpret the dreams of the patient (Ridgway, 2007).

Criticism on Freud Theory

There are various modern psychologists who have declared the Freud's theory as vague because it relies too much on ambiguity for its information collection through dreams and free associations. This thing has made the theory weak. Freud overemphasized the unconscious mind, childhood experiences and dream ...