Life Instincts (Eros) and Death Instincts (Thanatos) By Kendra Cherry Updated May 06, 2016 Sigmund Freud’s theory of drives evolved throughout his life and work. He initially described a class of drives known as the life instincts and believed that these drives were responsible for much of behavior. Eventually, he came to believe that these life instincts alone could not explain all human behavior. Freud determined that all instincts fall into one of two major classes: the life instincts or the death instincts. Life Instincts (Eros) Sometimes referred to as sexual instincts, the life instincts are those that deal with basic survival, pleasure, and reproduction. These instincts are essential for sustaining the life of the individual as well as the continuation of the species. While they are often called sexual instincts, these drives also include such things as thirst, hunger, and pain avoidance. The energy created by the life instincts is known as libido . Behaviors commonly associated with the life instinct include love , cooperation and other prosocial actions .

Death Instincts (Thanatos) The concept of the death instincts was initially described in Freud's book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he proposed that “the goal of all life is death” (1920). He noted that after people experience a traumatic event (such as war), they often reenact the experience. He concluded that people hold an unconscious desire to die, but that the life instincts largely temper this wish. In Freud’s view, self-destructive behavior is an expression of the energy created by the death instincts. When this energy is directed outward onto others, it is expressed as aggression and violence. A glossary of Freudian terms. and department chair of East-West Psychology at CIIS Key concepts attributed to Freud appear below in alpha order. I hope that the humorous sidebars amuse rather than distract. A listing the origins of Freud's main ideas appears at the end of this glossary. Freud was much more of a synthesizer than an innovator. Some "Translation Notes" are included to clarify bad renderings of Freud's polished German terms into Latinized English.

(See Bettelheim's book on Freud and Man's Soul.) "I'd rather have a good friend than a good translator," Freud remarked about the clumsy and inaccurate work of James Strachey. For readers of English this sentiment has proved regrettable. See also various quotations by Alfred Adler and my Glossary of Jungian Terms . I've also written a paper called Freud's Thanatical Reductions: the Death Drive as Symbolic Cynicism . This page is dedicated to everyone who has taught me about psychoanalysis, including Allen Bishop, Avedis Panajian, Cathy Rives, Christine Peterson, and Jackie Oliva. Affection: aim-inhibited sexuality. We connect affectionately because we can't spend all our time having sex. Aggression: for Freud, intinctive and innate. See Thanatos. Agoraphobia: the ego's method of self-limitation for avoiding the anxiety of acting out a sexual desire. Don't leave the house without id. Anaclitic: the kind of love that is directed toward an object, usually a parent. Contrast narcissistic. Anal Character: one fixed at the anal level of psychosexual development, when the libido charges the anus with energy.

People stuck at this early stage are regarded as parsimonious, obstinate, hoarding, and perfectionistic. Analysis, the purpose of: to give the ego more control over the repressed id impulses. "Where there is id, there shall ego be." Analysis, the fundamental rule of: to say whatever what comes into one's mind without censoring any of it. See free association. Anti-Cathexis: a process of internal frustration that, evolved from experiences of external frustration, sets up and maintains a repression. It involves the withdrawal of libido from whatever is being repressed. Anti-cathexes also oppose the impulsive cathexes otherwise made by the id toward objects. See cathexis. Anxiety, three types: reality (anxiety about the external world), normal or moral (anxiety about the superego's (originally, the parents') punishing shoulds and oughts), and neurotic (anxiety that a repressed sexual wish might surface). Anxiety is felt only by the ego and might have hereditary components. In his later work Freud referred to anxiety as a danger signal.

Archaic Heritage: phylogenetic remnants of the species' mental functioning such as inherited dispositions, ideational contents, and memory traces from former generations. Unlike Jung , who coined the term "collective unconscious" (now often referred to as the "objective psyche"), Freud gave these inherited remnants little more than a mention; for him, the wishes, feelings, and aggressions derived from the present life held much more importance. However, he does discuss them as a link between group and individual psychology, a repository of the ancestral memory of the murdered primal father (see Primal Horde), and the reason why Oedipal and castration fears are often excessive in comparison to actual family-of-origin dynamics. Association: the link between one mental content and another. To Freudian thought itself, for example, some people associate trains going into tunnels. Autoerotism: Havelock Ellis's term for the baby's habit of pleasing itself sensually with its own body. In normal development it gives way to an erotism directed at love partners. Bind: the process by which the secondary process manages or traps free libido. Thinking instead of fornicating, for instance.

(Obviously, binding has disadvantages as well as advantages....) Bisexuality: what we all have going psychically. For Freud, this meant that everyone is part passive (= female) and part active (= male), although later in his career he began to question those problematic traditional equations. The idea of inherent bisexuality came to him from his friend Wilhelm Fliess. Cathartic Method: the name Freud and Joseph Breuer gave to their method of allowing patients to get relief by talking out their previously repressed emotions. Freud quickly realized that this relief was only temporary and did not produce lasting personality changes. Breuer ran away when a patient fell in love with him. Freud lit a cigar. Castration: what boys fear from their fathers, a fear reinforced by the boy's eventual knowledge that women have no penis and are therefore "castrated." Castration anxiety forces the boy to repress his sexual desire for his mother and identify with his father, a formal rival for mother's love, and grow up to smoke a lot of cigars by way of defensive compensation. See Oedipal Complex.

Castration fear (boys) and penis envy (girl) together make up the "castration complex." Because women feel less intense castration anxiety (being "castrated" already), they develop less of a superego. Cathexis: the investment of libido in objects. An example would be Freud's enormous cathexis of interest around sexuality. Cathexes correspond to ideas, whereas affects are discharge products. Translation Note: in German the noun Freud uses is Besetzung and the verb is besetzen: occupation, to occupy. Given Freud's fondness for mechanico-electric metaphors, a more accurate word than cathexis might be charge. Compulsion Neurosis: a mental illness whose symptoms are either prohibitions and atonements (e.g., washing one's hands over and over) or symbolic substitute gratifications. As always for Freud, the problem's core is repressed sexual wishes--in this case the desire to masturbate. We now call this Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Condensation: the dream's tendency to combine several themes into one dream symbol. In this way the symbol can stand for several different thoughts, feelings, wishes, ideas.

Conscience: one of two sectors that comprise the superego. Basically, an internalized critical parent. The conscience turns our innate destructiveness back upon ourselves and thereby safeguards the cohesion of society. At the same time, renunciations of drive strengthen the conscience. Unlike the ego ideal's internalized standards, those of the conscience deal mainly with what is "bad." Ultimately, it is fear of castration. A severe conscience comes about by 1. frustration of a drive, which releases aggression needed to build the conscience, and 2. being loved, which directs innate aggression back to the person who has it. Conscious: a quality of the mental life of the ego. The ego uses consciousness to manage reality, which includes allowing pleasurable id gratifications that don't collide with everyday demands or provoke the "thou shalt not"s of the superego. Counter-transference: the therapist's transference projections--in other words, enactment of old conflicts from the family of origin--onto the patient. Example: when "Anna O" (Bertha Pappenheim) fell in love with Freud's partner Josef Breuer, he fled because the situation aroused intolerable emotions in him.

(For an example of Freud's countertransference, see his Dora paper.) The meaning of countertransference has broadened since Freud's time to include all the therapist's reactions toward the patient. Counter-wish: in a dream, an element that appears to contradict a wish but actually fulfills it. The frustration dreams of a masochist, for instance, who gets off on being frustrated. Culture, two purposes of: to protect us against nature, and to regulate our affairs with each other. To adapt to life in a culture, one must repress one's drives (repress one's sexuality and aggression, displacing the second onto suitable targets outside the culture and sublimating the first into other achievements). "Man is a savage beast," and to repeat a quotation from Plautus which Freud liked, "Homo homini lupus" ("Man is a wolf to man"--written, presumably, by a wolf). So Eros and Ananke (Love and Necessity) are the parents of civilization, and social restrictions on sexuality are unavoidable. Were it not for our need to live with one another, we could allow our drives free play and not be neurotic.

Translation Note: this term, kultur in German, is often mistranslated civilization, as in Civilization and its Discontents ("Discontents" per Freud should be translated "discomfort" or "malaise"). Death Instinct: should actually be translated "death drive." A fundamental tendency for life to seek the perfect equilibrium of entropic non-activity--in other words, dissolution. "The goal of life is death." See Thanatos. Defense Mechanism: a maneuver employed by the ego to protect itself against anxiety raised by intolerable impulses. All involve some degree of repression of the unacceptable impulse into unconsciousness. Examples include denial, idealization, splitting (e.g., both loving and hating someone but keeping both emotions entirely separate), reaction formation (e.g., becoming a Scoutmaster to prove to yourself that you don't hate children), undoing (basically, trying to repair an action for which you feel guilty), and an American favorite, intellectualization ("You ask me how I feel, and it seems to me that the relevancy of the issue has more to do with my sublimated urge to..." blah). Freud's daughter Anna discovered some more, perhaps because being analyzed by your father makes them so necessary to have handy.

Translation Note: the English term defense is actually farther from what Freud wrote in German: abwehr means to parry or to ward off, not to defend. Deflection and to deflect are more accurate terms than defense and to defend. Déjà Raconté: the patient's illusion of already having said or done something in the therapist's presence when this did not really occur. The patient indeed had the impulse, but didn't act on it. Often happens at payment time. Denial: a defense mechanism in which what is true is intellectually denied. Depression: caused by repressed anger at a lost object (an important person who has become unavailable, left, or died) directed toward oneself. Disavowal: a splitting of an ego confronted by some distressing demand from the outer world. Contrast this with repression, where the demand comes from within. Displacement: the dream's tricky transfer of high-impact emotionality onto unimportant material and an emotional cooling to hot material. This and condensation are the most important doers of the distortive dreamwork that censors the true wishes underneath the dream. Displacement also refers to the tendency of libido to invest itself in objects other than the original object of its aim.

It is therefore a key factor in personality development. Dream: an invariably egotistical internal state made external. A brief nightly psychosis. A regression prompted by an infantile wish seeking fulfillment. "The royal road to the unconscious" because dream symbols (discovered by Scherner) can be interpreted in a way that enlightens the therapist about what's going on in the patient's unconscious. Dreams are compromises in that they express a conflict about a wish: pulling together material left over from the previous day, they fulfill the wish (or several wishes) symbolically but keep that unconscious and the dreamer asleep through the use of a repressive censor who rewrites the latent emotional material into manifest imagery difficult to understand. Dreams are invariably the products of conflict and can be prompted by either ego or id. Translation Note: Freud's work on dreams is often translated in a way that gives the impression of a fixed system of symbols (e.g., tunnels mean vaginas and towers mean penises). Dream-day: the day before the dream, and from which it gathers its material. Dream Series: a serious of similar dreams; it is to be interpreted as a whole.

Dreamwork: the mental activity that translates the latent wish-seeking unconscious material into the manifest imagery that disguises it. Dreamwork is NOT the work one does on a dream. Includes condensation, displacement of affect, identification, composition, inversion, and secondary elaboration. (Since Freud's time the dreamwork seems to be falling down on the job. Some of these cigar-in-mouth and piston-in-shaft and tearing-your-boss's-head-off dreams don't seem to be very well disguised.) Drive: Trieb in German; this word is almost always translated "instinct," incorrectly. By drive Freud meant the bodily demands upon mental life. Freud believed in good materialist fashion that mind arose from drive, ego from id. A drive has a source (bodily needs that arise from the erogenous zones), an impetus, an internal aim (temporary removal of the bodily need), an external aim (the steps taken to reach the final goal of the internal aim), and an object. Drives give rise to the libido-energy that drives all psychological activity. We never experience the drive itself, just its representation or idea in the mind.

A drives might undergo the following "vicissitudes": reversal into its opposite (via either changing from active to passive or reversing its content--love into hate); turning around upon the subject; repression; sublimation; and anxiety. The operation of the first two vicissitudes depends on the narcissistic organization of the ego. All these vicissitudes amount to the drive subjugated to the three great polarities that regulate psychic life: activity/passivity (biological), ego/external world (real), pleasure/pain (economic). Drive Derivative: associations, symptoms, anxiety, and other kinds of material derived from a repressed drive. Ego (Ich): the "I," a rational, organized agency that distills gradually out of a passionate id that rubs up against reality. Emerging from an undifferentiated mass of sensations (chiefly those emanating from the surface of the body), formed by identifications and abandoned id cathexes, and strengthened by speech, which links auditory and visual memory traces with the conscious life, the ego strives to harmonize inner and outer, drives (which it keeps at bay mainly via repression, sublimation and anticathexes), inhibition, and reality.

Unlike Jung's conception of ego, it is not entirely conscious, though it is the bearer of consciousness. Topographically, it extends down into the id. Translation Note: the latinized term ego is unnecessary and mechanical; Freud wrote, and meant, "I." Ego Cathexes: investments of libido into ego activities like ideas that the ego knows represent objects. You think about what you want instead of blindly leaping for it because of the energy investment remaining with your thoughts. Ego Ideal: the sector of the superego that consists of internalized standards of what is "good." Shoulds and oughts for Freud represent the higher human nature, whereas for most of us they represent the highest accomplishment of Sunday school. Ego-Instincts: an early concept denoting the ego's self-preservative drives (as opposed to the other-directed sexual drives). The concept came about from the notion of conflicts between ego and sexuality. The duality of Eros and the death drive replaced this old duality. Electra Complex: the feminine equivalent of the male Oedipal Complex. A chief difference is that the girl isn't required to shift her identification from her mother to her father.

Also, because of penis envy, she wants to have a baby with her father; this desire later gets acted out by her choice of a fatherly man to have a baby with. The term "Electra Complex" may have been proposed by Jung. Endopsychic Conflict: the opposition of a cathexis by an anti-cathexis (or: being torn between a desire to satisfy a wish and a fear of doing so). Two types: id-ego conflicts and superego-ego conflicts. Erogenous (or Erotogenic) Zones: those areas of the body most liable to sexual stimulation--namely, the mouth, anus, and penis, although Freud regarded the entire body as an erogenous zone. Eros: one of the two basic sources of all the drives. Eros, whose name comes from the Greek god of love, is the principle of life; it binds together and is most clearly seen in love. Its drives tend to be more plastic and displaceable than those of its opponent, Thanatos, the death drive. Freud saw psychic life as an interplay of these two ever-interpenetrating forces, Life and Death.

Erotogenicity: the activity of a bodily area that conveys sexually exciting stimuli to the mind. Family Romance: the tendency to defensively glamorize one's family of origin in order to avoid hating them. Fausse Reconnaisance: a false memory of having told the analyst something previously. Prompted by a fantasy of wanting to tell something but not following through, perhaps due to resistance. Fetishism: based on the (usually) male fetishist wanting to avoid his own castration fears by insisting that women have a penis--namely, the fetish. Hm! Fixation: when something libidinal is arrested in its development even though the rest of the personality keeps on growing up. Force: necessary to the preservation of a society because people have innate aggressive, incestuous, and cannibalistic tendencies and won't work unless coerced. Freud regarded the conflict between person and culture to be, at bottom, unresolvable; at best, society's dictates and codes become internalized into a superego that acts as an internal agent of society.

Free Association: you are talking about a particular image in a dream, or an event that happened during the day that stuck with you, and your analyst asks: "What does that bring to mind?" Your candid response consists of associations, "free" because freely experienced and shared. The more superficial and random the associations, the more one should suspect that the censor is at work. A source of this technique begins with "Emmy von N." (Barronness Fanny Moser), a wealthy widow patient who got tired of Freud's questions and said he should stop asking her where this or that came from, but let her tell what she had to say. She was also the patient who convinced Freud of the uselessness of hypnosis for deep treatment. Translation note: Freud here used the word Einfall, which denotes what comes spontaneously into one's mind. Freudian Slip: a mistake, usually of speech, made due to the collision of conscious and unconscious conflicts. An example made famous by Freud: the reluctant official who opens a meeting by accidentally declaring it closed, thereby revealing his true wish.

God: an idealized image of a nurturing (and primal) father created to reconcile us to Fate's cruelty, compensate us for the injustices of life, lend social moralities a divine origin, and personify and appease the uncontrollable forces of nature. He is a condensation of prior gods. His Judeo-Christian characteristics unconsciously permeate Freudian thought. Group Psychology: Freud distrusted groups, particularly large ones, almost as much as Jung did. Two key components of mass process: regressive identification with a powerful leader or idea, and replacement of one's ego ideal with that leader or idea. Translation Note: Freud wrote mass in German; this is usually mistranslated into "group." Guilt: from either a dread of an external authority or dread of the demands and punishments of the superego, an internalized authority. It is through drive-repressing guilt and the resulting sublimations that civilization arose. Guilt also has a primeval source: the murder of the primal father (see Primal Horde). Hypnosis: Freud spent a year in Paris learning it from Charcot. Impressed at first, he later abandoned it; as with the cathartic method, it did not produce long-term results.

Id (Es): the permanently unconscious motivational cauldron of the mind. From the id (the "it") originate all the drives that impel psychic life. A "residue of countless egos" inherited from prior generations, the id is the amoral beast within us that seeks only its own gratification through tension discharge. It is powered by the bodily instincts and is wholly irrational. Analogous to the job of the imperialist and the industrialist, the job of the ego is to dominate it. (The term id comes from Groddeck, who got it from Nietzsche.) Translation Note: Freud wrote "the it" in German; this use should be retained rather than the latinized id. Identification: an early, primitive kind of attachment to an object which results in incorporating some of its aspects into oneself. Ego and superego make use of identification to attract libido away from objects and toward themselves, thereby building up the personality. Other types include narcissistic, goal-oriented, object-loss, and aggressor identification. Imago: see Object. Instinct: see drive. Freud discussed instincts, which are relatively unchangeable, primarily in connection with animal life, not human life.

Introjection: Ferenczi's term for the psychological action by which a person is internalized and made a part of one's own psyche. Inversion: 1. Homosexuality, the cause of which, for Freud, was in the boy's failure to disidentify with Mom and identify with Dad and in the girl's identification with Dad rather than Mom. 2. The dream's transformation of one thing into its opposite in order to disguise it. Latent Content: the true thoughts below the manifest imagery of the dream. Psychoanalysis seeks to translate the "disguised" manifest content into the true latent, and therefore repressed, wishes of the dreamer. Libido: the psychosexual energy originating in the id. Libido is the electric current of the mechanism of personality. It powers all psychological operations, invests desires, and undergoes ready displacement. It is the basic fuel of the self. Because it is of a relatively fixed quantity, like gasoline in a tank, it obeys laws of psychical "economy" in that a surplus in one system means a loss somewhere else. It can be either free or bound (Breuer's term). Melancholia: see Depression.

Manifest Content: what we usually think of as the dream itself, and what Freudians see as surface, a disguise of the true latent dream material. Masochism: caused by an alloy of erotism and a sadistic superego. It fills the ego with a desire to atone by punishing itself. An original or primary masochism develops into a 1. feminine, 2. erotogenic, or 3. moral masochism via a turning of unresolved sadism against oneself (secondary masochism). Too much internalized death drive and you get masochism; when directed outward, sadism. Melancholia: we now call this depression. For Freud it shares with mourning a gradual withdrawing of libido from an object known to be lost or dead--but it is different in that the unconscious hatred felt toward the object with which the ego narcissistically identifies is turned against the ego. One then achieves revenge against the lost object by getting depressed.

Metapsychological: taken together, those aspects of Freud's theorizing that are economical ( the hydraulics of unpleasure-avoidance through pleasure), dynamic (libido movements among id, ego, and superego), and topographic (psyche as structured into conscious, preconscious, and unconscious layers). Metapsychology also takes clinical observations beyond the consulting room and applies them to everyone, with varying results. Although psychoanalysis began as a treatment method, Freud's real interest was caught by those theorizings that applied it to human psychology in general. Referring to two recent books, Freud wrote this to his friend Oskar Pfister: "I do not know whether you have guessed the hidden link between my 'Lay Analysis' and 'Illusion.' In the former I want to protect analysis from physicians, and in the latter from priests.

I want to entrust it to a profession that doesn't yet exist, a profession of secular ministers of souls, who don't have to be physicians and must not be priests." Moses: based on work by Sellin, Frazier, and others, Freud speculated two Moses: an Egyptian nobleman who lived near the time of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaton, the founder of the first monotheism, and gave the Hebrews a modified version of that religion and was killed by them as a result; and a Midianite who resurrected this religion, modified it still further, and coupled it with the Egyptian rite of circumcision, thereby setting the Hebrews apart as a chosen people. Narcissism: the investment of libido into oneself. The libidinal equivalent of egotism. Freud regarded it as a perversion until 1914, when in "On Narcissism" he wrote that normal development means transferring more and more attention and interest into other people and thereby decreasing one's original or primary state of narcissism.

Primary narcissism is the self-involvement all infants start out with; secondary narcissism is a turning of libido away from objects back to the ego, as with what we now call the narcissistic personality. Neurosis: a conflict between ego and id that produces symptoms of psychological discomfort. This physiologic-sounding term has been changed to "anxiety disorder." That's regrettable, since many neuroses don't involve conscious anxiety. Neurosis results because we live in cultures that require for their cohesion a renunciation of our drives, a repression that makes us a bit irrational. Nirvana Principle: Barbara Low's term for the psychological equivalent of homeostasis, the push for the least amount of tension. Different from the pleasure principle in that 1. pleasure sometimes increases with tension, and 2. the Nirvana Principle is primarily under the sway of the death drive, whereas the pleasure principle is powered by Eros. Object: a mental representation of a person. Also called an imago. Oedipal Complex: the boy's tendency, around the age of five, to experience his freshly awakened sexual strivings toward his mother while wanting to replace his father in her affections. Mostly unconscious.

When successfully resolved, these feelings are fully repressed, and the boy, afraid of castration, learns to identify with his father. As a result of all this, he internalizes his parents and acquires a superego whose ego ideal replaces some of his early narcissism. The feminine equivalent has been named the Electra Complex, but for Freud, women have inferior superego development and therefore an inferior conscience because they never have to disidentify with mother as boys do. Freud saw an unresolved Oedipal Complex as the cause of every significant neurosis. The name comes from King Oedipus, who killed his father, married his mother unknowingly, and put his own eyes out (which Freud interprets as symbolic castration) when he discovered the truth of his origins. In a late innovation, Freud was prompted by the work of female analysts like Helene Deutsch to emphasize the initial pre-Oedipal strength of the mother-daughter bond. Oral Character: forever wanting to suck, to consume, to take in, endlessly hungry and needy. See Psychosexual Development. Orgasm: in women, vaginal rather than clitoral, the latter being a symptom of immaturity. Paranoia: a defense against unconscious homosexuality.

(Later analysts see paranoia as a projection of the paranoid person's aggressive impulses.) Parapraxis: Freud never used this word. He wrote of the Fehlleistung, the faulty achievement, when we mean to do one thing and do another. Slips of the tongue are one example. Penis Envy: a subset of the castration complex, it involves the supposed envy of "castrated" women of the male member, which they later seek to possess via pregnancy and childbirth. Freud believed that women never forgive their mothers for leaving them "castrated" and without a penis. Certainly Freud's little sister was left with something to think about after her mother left her without a piano. Freud, the family tyrant, disliked music, and his wish-fulfilments were law. Perversion: a sexual drive component that fails to come under the dominance of the genital area and its reproductive needs and instead focuses on some non-reproductive object or aim. Phobias: in general, due to repressed sexual wishes aroused unconsciously when the phobic object resembles the yearned-for object of gratification. The phobia of animals = dread of the father.

Pleasure Principle (long version: the Pleasure-Pain Principle): our most fundamental striving is toward pleasure and away from pain. Pleasure is what we feel when some kind of tension is relieved. Two types: forepleasure (infantile stimulation) and endpleasure (mature satisfaction). See Reality Principle. Polymorphous Perversity: the young child's tendency to get sexual gratification from damn near anything, regardless of its gender or nature. As a result of psychosexual development, this tendency is usually replaced by "normal" heterosexuality. Preconscious: that which upon reflection could become conscious voluntarily. For instance, remembering your wife's name when you weren't thinking about her. The ego's inner layer. That which is unconscious is repressed and therefore held out of awareness. Predicate Thinking: the id's tendency to treat dissimilar objects as identical. See Primary Process. Primal Horde: the original primitive grouping of humanity headed by a father-authority who forbad incestuous actings-out among younger men, who, to gain their sexual freedom, eventually overpowered and eating him and thereby discovered the powers and benefits of community. In a way, similar to what befell the Wednesday Psychological Society.

Primal Fantasies: unconscious fantasies stemming from having perceived one's parents having sex. Primary Process: produces a memory image of an object needed for gratification in order to reduce the frustration of not having been gratified yet. This develops as the id encounters frustrations of its desires, and it works because for the id, an image is the same as an object ("an identity of perception"). Primary process is preverbal and dreamlike, not rational as with the ego. It's called "primary" because it comes first in human development: for Freud if not for later theorists, the baby is, so to speak, all id. Projection: experiencing someone emotionally in the present in terms of someone in your past. Psychoanalysis: the theories and therapies that have evolved from Freud's work with his patients. Examples include neoanalysis, object relations, ego psychology, self psychology, and intersubjectivity. Psychodynamic: the perspective that personality is constituted by interacting and sometimes conflicting psychological forces. Psychosexual Development: Freud's developmental notions, many inspired by Karl Abraham's original work, centered around the idea that libido invests certain bodily zones with energy as the child grows older.

The order of stages is: oral (birth to eight months), anal (eight months to two years), phallic (two years to six), latency (six to twelve), genital (puberty to adult). As one masters the stages, one's ability to exert ego control over one's drives grows. Family conflict can fixate a person on any of these stages and thereby produce a lasting effect on character: the greedy, ever-empty, grasping oral type; the fanatically orderly and controlling anal type; the thrusting, ambitious phallic type; the quiescent latent type (this one isn't seen as so pathological)--and the mature outcome of a successful upbringing OR analysis, the genital type, devoted to love and work, but not necessarily in that order. Psychosis: whereas a neurosis is a conflict between ego and id, psychosis is a conflict between ego and reality. Purified Pleasure-Ego: that sector of the ego that rids itself of badness by projecting it onto external objects. Reality Principle: the ego's sense of realistic and rational adaptive expectations. This principle evolves from and governs the heedless hedonism of the Pleasure Principle, at least in people who aren't wealthy.

Reality-Testing: the knack of distinguishing between inner and outer, fantasy and externality. Regression: a return, temporary or chronic, to an earlier level of psychological development. (An example would be the second Bush administration.) Religion: a childlike yearning for an all-powerful Parent to take away feelings of helplessness that arise from confronting the forces of nature. A collective neurosis. An illusion (not necessarily an error) arising from childish wishes, religion spares many a believer an individual neurosis by reducing him to "psychical infantilism." The first religion was a form of totemism. Repetition Compulsion: the urge to do the same thing over and over, especially in terms of relationship patterns (e.g., always winding up with the same kind of partner). Rather than seeing it as unlearned lessons reconstellated in the present, Freud linked this to the death drive's push toward a conservative return to previous conditions. Repression: the ego's ridding itself of unacceptable desires and ideas by dumping them into unconsciousness.

Three conditions lead to a return of the repressed into consciousness: when the counter-cathexis holding it down weaken; when the drives below it get stronger; or when recent events similar in theme to what's repressed reawaken it; in all three cases the repressed shows up in the very method used for repression (e.g., an archeologist who represses his erotic nature falling in love with an alluring statue). "Primal repressions" are handed down from the painful experiences of prior generations (example: incest taboo) and keep certain contents of the id from ever becoming conscious. "Repression proper" (also called "after-expulsion") has to do with the repression of associations and ideas related to whatever idea is chiefly being repressed. An aim of psychoanalysis is to turn repression into condemnation. Translation Note: in German, Freud wrote about verdrangung, which really ought to be translated into repulsion and repulse. Resistance: the patient's effort to remain unconscious of what is repressed. Common forms of resistance include arguing with the therapist, refusing to free associate, forgetting to show up for a session, reducing spirit to a compensation for helplessness, and deploying defense mechanisms in order to remain unaware of unconscious material.

The negative therapeutic reaction is the most difficult form of resistance and is motivated by the need to expiate an unconscious sense of guilt via self-defeating behavior. Scopophilia: the pathological enjoyment that comes with watching sexual activity. This is a mistranslation of Schaulust, "sexual pleasure in looking." Screen Memories: memory fragments that cover a child's earliest and forgotten sexual fantasies. Secondary Elaboration: the dreamer's tendency to fill in gaps in the dream and explain its mysteries in order to understand it better. This usually leads to significant misunderstandings of the dream's true latent content. Secondary Process: the ego's reality-testing and energy-binding capability. In other words, thinking and reasoning. See Primary Process. Self-Analysis: Freud conducted a long analysis of himself during the time he formulated the first psychoanalytic concepts. He believed much could be learned by analyzing oneself, but that being analyzed by someone else was necessary due to the many resistances and blind spots that occur in the course of self-observation. Asked about the number of analytic pioneers who had not been analyzed, he replied that they definitely weren't the better for it. Sexuality: obtaining physical pleasure. A much wider notion than reproduction and one that extends over the entire lifespan.

It was apparently Wilhelm Fleiss, an intelligent crank who became Freud's closest friend, who got him thinking about childhood sexuality. See eros. Sibling Rivalry: based in what Freud, who'd been a momma's boy, saw as a result of childrens' overriding egotism. See Projection. Soul: James Strachey has almost everywhere translated Seele--soul--into "mind" in his Revised Edition of Freud's works and its operations into the medical-sounding "mental apparatus." For Freud, soul was the overarching reality of all psychic functioning, conscious and unconscious. It had no sense for him of something supernatural, but it was his preferred term when describing the psyche as a whole as well as its very essence. If archetypal psychologist James Hillman has placed soul on an imaginal basis, Freud was the first to bring it into the realm of psychological discussion. Spirituality: the power of abstract thought. For this reason Freud saw the commandment against idolatry as an elevation of culture: our object of central concern, God, has become invisible and therefore abstract. See Religion. Sublimation: when a sexual drive is directed into a different aim, like daily work, creativity, piety, etc.

( Jung didn't like that Freud came up with this concept, so he coined a term that means pretty much the same thing but called it psychization.) It was Goethe who introduced this term into common German usage; Hegel took it up later, as did Freud. Superego (Uber-Ich): formed out of but less conscious than the ego, an agency that safeguards society from uncontrolled acting out by giving the person an internalization of all environmental inhibitions, particularly those of the parents. Developed as a result of millennia of monotheistic moralizing the resolution of the Oedipal complex, it fills you with guilt when you deviate from your internal standards. It's a kind of parent-within formed of reaction formations to unconscious sexual wishes; obeying it results in the secondary narcissism of pride, an expectation of being loved by a parent figure, and disobeying it creates guilt. One of the therapeutic tasks is to lower its demands, which emanate less from the parents than from the parents' superego. It is subdivided into the conscience and the ego ideal and reaches deep down into the id.

Translation Note: "Over-I" is more experience-near than the more ponderous translation superego, which makes it sound like a mechanism rather than something we harbor psychically. Symptom: a partial satisfaction of a repressed wish. Symptoms blend repressive mechanisms with symbolic satisfactions; for that reason Freud considered them compromise formations. Every symptom has some anxiety behind it. Thanatos: the mythic name students of Freud gave to the death drive he postulated in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This drive represents the organic need to return to lifelessness and stasis, the ultimate calm of lifeless non-conflict. Freud traced all aggressive and destructive activity to this notion, which impressed him deeply after the outbreak of one world war and the death of his daughter Sophie. That portion of the drive which is turned outward benefits the organism, which would otherwise direct it against itself. However, Freud did concede that destructiveness also affords the ego satisfaction of its old narcissistic need for omnipotence. Taboo: a sacred-feeling prohibition that applies to an entire group. Its true purpose is to keep incestuous wishes unconscious.

The rituals surrounding the taboo are similar to those of obsessive-compulsive neurosis but are collective rather than personal. Telepathy: Freud believed tentatively in the possibility of telepathy, linking it with the emergence of psychic material from the primary to the secondary process. Topographical: Freud's division of psyche into three layers: the preconscious, the conscious, and the unconscious. Totem: a common ancestor of a clan. Symbolized most often by an animal, it symbolizes the clan's guardian spirit or helper. Psychologically, the totem is a stand-in for the father. Totemism: the earliest form of religion, intended to forbid incestuous desires felt by family members toward one another. Freud regarded it as the basis of all other social obligations and norms. Transference: a type of projection in which early parental conflicts are reexperienced with the therapist, whose job is to interpret them back to the patient. Freud first saw transference as a hindrance because it distorted the relationship between patient and therapist; later, he argued that a positive transference onto the analyst could help the psychoanalysis progress. He distinguished three kinds: negative, erotic, and sensible. Traumatic Neuroses: those caused by situations of unusually high stress.

They are the sole possible exception to the rule of neuroses being caused by unresolved Oedipal conflicts. Unconscious: that which is repressed out of awareness. Its core is instinct-representations consisting of wish-impulses. Also, see Id. Undoing: a defense mechanism by which we try to undo something we feel shouldn't have been done to begin with. (Example: doghouse flowers.) Wit-work: the process by which a denied impulse (invariably hostile or obscene) is converted into a joke. Similar to dreamwork. Women: needier, more demanding of affection, less governed by conscience, more prone to neurosis and hysteria, fundamentally passive, more narcissistic. For more about this, see Projection. (In all fairness, it should be noted that Freud, a strong advocate for women becoming analysts, worked actively and vocally against attempts to block women from entering his profession.) Origins of some key "Freudian" concepts: Defense: Alfred Adler, who used the softer term ï¿½safeguarding.ï¿½ Freud took over the idea but replaced the name with a German word that evokes the parrying of a sword thrust.

The term ï¿½defenseï¿½ came from Meynert. Symbolism, in symptoms and dreams: Sandor Ferenczi. It took him a while to convince Freud of the significance of symbols. Repression: Johann Herbart, who discussed its role in keeping ideas unconscious (1816). He also developed a conflict model of mind. Aggression, innate: Alfred Adler. He believed aggression to be a compensatory response to a feeling of powerlessness. Freud biologized this concept and called it the death drive, prompting Adler to smilingly remark, ï¿½I make him a present of it.ï¿½ Also originated by Sabina Spielrein. Infantile sexuality: Wilhelm Fleiss, metaphysician and ear, nose, and throat specialist. Dynamic unconscious: Four years before Freudï¿½s ï¿½discovery,ï¿½ Pierre Janet wrote that ï¿½hysterical symptoms are due to subconscious fixed ideas that have been isolated and usually forgotten.ï¿½ He also anticipated Jung by noting these split-off fragments to be ï¿½autonomous.ï¿½ Freudï¿½s famous iceberg analogy of mind came from Fechner.

Transference: A joint coinage by Freud and Breuer. Former term: magnetic rapport. Projection: Renamed by Freud from Robert Vischerï¿½s concept of einfuhlung, the projection of feelings onto the people and things around us. Introjection: Sandor Ferenczi. Narcissism: Coined by Paul Naecke and cited by Havelock Ellis. Freud did not pay much attention to it until Lou Andreas-Salome began developing the idea clinically. Autoerotism: Havelock Ellis. Erotism, importance of: That Freudï¿½s emphasis on the importance of sex and Eros scandalized the Victorian public is untrue. Many researchers before and during the time Freud wrote were maintaining exactly the same thing. What troubled readers was Freudï¿½s dogmatic overemphasis on sex combined with reductionistic interpretations. Erotism, in dream symbols: Karl Scherner. Sublimation: Fleiss, who probably took it from Nietzsche. Bisexuality, inherence of: Fleiss. He ended contact with Freud over this theft.

(Incidentally, Fleiss believed the unconscious of men to be feminine--masculine for women--an idea that found its way into Jungï¿½s concept of the anima and animus.) Id: Georg Groddeck, who had been influenced by Nietzsche. Allergic to the leader-disciple relationship, Groddeck resisted Freudï¿½s attempts to persuade him into the psychoanalytic fold. Imago: Jung, who saw the word in the title of a play by Spitteler. Determinism, psychical: Ernst Brücke, Freudï¿½s old mentor, for whom all manifestations of life were rigidly chemical interactions. Freudï¿½s steely gaze was modeled after Brückeï¿½s. Compulsion to repeat: Named by Freud but described by Gabriel Tarde and by Gustav Fechner. Complex: Jung, who studied its activity in the laboratory. Free association: If we discount Janetï¿½s ï¿½automatic talkingï¿½: a joint invention by Freud and his patient Fanny Moser, who got tired of being interrupted by his constant interpretations and demanded that he let her ramble wherever her thoughts would take the session.

Yves De-lage had discussed digging up the memories behind dream symbols by associating to the symbols. Couch, as tool: Taken over from standard French hypnotic practice. Primal horde: J. J. Atkinson. Reality Principle: Janetï¿½s ï¿½Function of Reality.ï¿½ Pleasure Principle, its application to jokes, the mind as topography, principle of constancy, Nirvana Principle, the accumulation and discharge of energy: Fechner. Sigmund Freud's Theories | Simply Psychology by Saul McLeod published 2013 Freud’s lexicon has become embedded within the vocabulary of western society. Words he introduced through his theories are now used by everyday people, such as anal (personality), libido, denial, repression, cathartic, Freudian slip, and neurotic. Freud believed that when we explain our own behaviour to ourselves or others (conscious mental activity) we rarely give a true account of our motivation. This is not because we are deliberately lying. Whilst human beings are great deceivers of others, they are even more adept at self-deception. Our rationalizations of our conduct are therefore disguising the real reasons.

Freud’s life work was dominated by his attempts to find ways of penetrating this often subtle and elaborate camouflage that obscures the hidden structure and processes of personality. Freud was the founding father of psychoanalysis , a method for treating mental illness and also a theory which explains human behavior. Psychoanalysis is often known as the talking cure. Typically Freud would encourage his patients to talk freely (on his famous couch) regarding their symptoms, and to describe exactly what was on their mind. The Case of Anna O The case of Anna O (real name Bertha Pappenheim) marked a turning point in the career of a young Viennese neuropathologist by the name of Sigmund Freud. It even went on to influence the future direction of psychology as a whole. Anna O. suffered from hysteria, a condition in which the patient exhibits physical symptoms (e.g. paralysis, convulsions, hallucinations, loss of speech) without an apparent physical cause. Her doctor Josef Breuer succeeded in treating Anna by helping her to recall forgotten memories of traumatic events. During discussions with her it became apparent that she had developed a fear of drinking, when a dog she hated drank from her glass. Her other symptoms originated when caring for her sick father.

She would not express her anxiety for her his illness but did express it later, during psychoanalysis. As soon as she had the opportunity to make these unconscious thoughts conscious her paralysis disappeared. Breuer discussed the case with his friend Freud. Out of these discussions came the germ of an idea that Freud was to pursue for the rest of his life. In Studies in Hysteria (1895) Freud proposed that physical symptoms are often the surface manifestations of deeply repressed conflicts. However, Freud was not just advancing an explanation of a particular illness. Implicitly he was proposing a revolutionary new theory of the human psyche itself. This theory emerged “bit by bit” as a result of Freud’s clinical investigations and it led him to propose that there were at least three levels of the mind. The Unconscious Mind Freud (1900, 1905) developed a topographical model of the mind, whereby he described the features of the mind’s structure and function. Freud used the analogy of an iceberg to describe the three levels of the mind. On the surface is consciousness, which consists of those thoughts that are the focus of our attention now, and this is seen as the tip of the iceberg.

The preconscious consists of all which can be retrieved from memory. The third and most significant region is the unconscious. Here lie the processes that are the real cause of most behaviour. Like an iceberg, the most important part of the mind is the part you cannot see. The unconscious mind acts as a repository, a ‘cauldron’ of primitive wishes and impulse kept at bay and mediated by the preconscious area.For example, Freud (1915) found that some events and desires were often too frightening or painful for his patients to acknowledge, and believed such information was locked away in the unconscious mind. This can happen through the process of repression . Sigmund Freud emphasized the importance of the unconscious mind, and a primary assumption of Freudian theory is that the unconscious mind governs behavior to a greater degree than people suspect. Indeed, the goal of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious. The Psyche Freud (1923) later developed a more structural model of the mind comprising the entities id, ego and superego (what Freud called “the psychic apparatus”). These are not physical areas within the brain, but rather hypothetical conceptualizations of important mental functions.

Freud assumed the id operated at an unconscious level according to the pleasure principle (gratification from satisfying basic instincts). The id comprises two kinds of biological instincts (or drives) which Freud called Eros and Thanatos. Eros, or life instinct, helps the individual to survive; it directs life-sustaining activities such as respiration, eating and sex (Freud, 1925). The energy created by the life instincts is known as libido. In contrast, Thanatos or death instinct, is viewed as a set of destructive forces present in all human beings (Freud, 1920). When this energy is directed outward onto others, it is expressed as aggression and violence. Freud believed that Eros is stronger than Thanatos, thus enabling people to survive rather than self-destruct. The ego develops from the id during infancy. The ego's goal is to satisfy the demands of the id in a safe a socially acceptable way. In contrast to the id the ego follows the reality principle as it operates in both the conscious and unconscious mind. The superego develops during early childhood (when the child identifies with the same sex parent ) and is responsible for ensuring moral standards are followed.

The superego operates on the morality principle and motivates us to behave in a socially responsible and acceptable manner. The basic dilemma of all human existence is that each element of the psychic apparatus makes demands upon us that are incompatible with the other two. Inner conflict is inevitable. For example, the superego can make a person feel guilty if rules are not followed. When there is conflict between the goals of the id and superego, the ego must act as a referee and mediate this conflict. The ego can deploy various defense mechanisms (Freud, 1894, 1896) to prevent it from becoming overwhelmed by anxiety. Defense Mechanisms Click here for more information on defense mechanisms. Psychosexual Stages In the highly repressive “Victorian” society in which Freud lived and worked women, in particular, were forced to repress their sexual needs. In many cases the result was some form of neurotic illness. Freud sought to understand the nature and variety of these illnesses by retracing the sexual history of his patients. This was not primarily an investigation of sexual experiences as such.

Far more important were the patient’s wishes and desires, their experience of love, hate, shame, guilt and fear – and how they handled these powerful emotions. It was this that led to the most controversial part of Freud’s work – his theory of psychosexual development and of the Oedipus complex Freud believed that children are born with a libido – a sexual (pleasure) urge. There are a number of stages of childhood, during which the child seeks pleasure from a different ‘object’. To be psychologically healthy, we must successfully complete each stage. Mental abnormality can occur if a stage is not completed successfully and the person becomes ‘fixated’ in a particular stage. This particular theory shows how adult personality is determined by childhood experiences. Dream Analysis Freud (1900) considered dreams to be the royal road to the unconscious as it is in dreams that the ego's defenses are lowered so that some of the repressed material comes through to awareness, albeit in distorted form. Dreams perform important functions for the unconscious mind and serve as valuable clues to how the unconscious mind operates. On 24 July 1895, Freud had his own dream that was to form the basis of his theory.

He had been worried about a patient, Irma, who was not doing as well in treatment as he had hoped. Freud in fact blamed himself for this, and was feeling guilty. Freud dreamed that he met Irma at a party and examined her. He then saw a chemical formula for a drug that another doctor had given Irma flash before his eyes and realized that her condition was caused by a dirty syringe used by the other doctor. Freud's guilt was thus relieved. Freud interpreted this dream as wish-fulfillment. He had wished that Irma's poor condition was not his fault and the dream had fulfilled this wish by informing him that another doctor was at fault. Based on this dream, Freud (1900) went on to propose that a major function of dreams was the fulfillment of wishes. Freud distinguished between the manifest content of a dream (what the dreamer remembers) and the latent content, the symbolic meaning of the dream (i.e. the underlying wish). The manifest content is often based on the events of the day. The process whereby the underlying wish is translated into the manifest content is called dream-work.

The purpose of dream work is to transform the forbidden wish into a non-threatening form, thus reducing anxiety and allowing us to continuing sleeping. Dream work involves the process of condensation, displacement, and secondary elaboration. The process of condensation is the joining of two or more ideas/images into one. For example, a dream about a man may be a dream about both one's father and one's lover. A dream about a house might be the condensation of worries about security as well as worries about one's appearance to the rest of the world. Displacement takes place when we transform the person or object we are really concerned about to someone else. For example, one of Freud’s patients was extremely resentful of his sister-in-law and used to refer to her as a dog, dreamed of strangling a small white dog. Freud interpreted this as representing his wish to kill his sister-in-law. If the patient would have really dreamed of killing his sister-in-law, he would have felt guilty. The unconscious mind transformed her into a dog to protect him. Secondary elaboration occurs when the unconscious mind strings together wish-fulfilling images in a logical order of events, further obscuring the latent content.

According to Freud this is why the manifest content of dreams can be in the form of believable events. In Freud’s later work on dreams he explored the possibility of universal symbols in dreams. Some of these were sexual in nature, including poles, guns and swords representing the penis and horse riding and dancing representing sexual intercourse. However, Freud was cautious about symbols and stated that general symbols are more personal rather than universal. A person cannot interpret what the manifest content of a dream symbolized without knowing about the person’s circumstances. 'Dream dictionaries', which are still popular now, were a source of irritation to Freud. In an amusing example of the limitations of universal symbols, one of Freud's patients, after dreaming about holding a wriggling fish, said to him 'that's a Freudian symbol - it must be a penis!' Freud explored further and it turned out that the woman's mother, who was a passionate astrologer and a Pisces, was on the patient's mind because she disapproved of her daughter being in analysis. It seems more plausible, as Freud suggested, that the fish represented the patient's mother rather than a penis!

Freud's Followers Freud attracted many followers, who formed a famous group in 1902 called the "Psychological Wednesday Society". The group met every Wednesday in Freud's waiting room. As the organization grew, Freud established an inner circle of devoted followers, the so-called "Committee" (including Sàndor Ferenczi, and Hanns Sachs (standing) Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, and Ernest Jones). At the beginning of 1908 the committee had 22 members and renamed themselves the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Critical Evaluation Freud's theory is good at explaining but not at predicting behavior (which is one of the goals of science ). For this reason Freud's theory is unfalsifiable - it can neither be proved true or refuted. For example, the unconscious mind is difficult to test and measure objectively. Overall, Freud's theory is highly unscientific.

Despite the scepticism of the unconscious mind, cognitive psychology has identified unconscious processes, such as procedural memory (Tulving, 1972), automatic processing (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Stroop, 1935), and social psychology have shown the importance of implicit processing (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Such empirical findings have demonstrated the role of unconscious processes in human behaviour. However, most of the evidence for Freud's theories is taken from an unrepresentative sample. He mostly studied himself, his patients and only one child (e.g. Little Hans ). The main problem here is that the case studies are based on studying one person in detail, and with reference to Freud the individuals in question are most often middle aged women from Vienna (i.e. his patients). This makes generalizations to the wider population (e.g. the whole world) difficult. However, Freud thought this unimportant, believing in only a qualitative difference between people. Freud may also have shown research bias in his interpretations - he may have only paid attention to information which supported his theories, and ignored information and other explanations that did not fit them.

However, Fisher & Greenberg (1996) argue that Freud’s theory should be evaluated in terms of specific hypotheses rather than as a whole. They concluded that there is evidence to support Freud’s concepts of oral and anal personalities and some aspects of his ideas on depression and paranoia. They found little evidence of the Oedipal conflict and no support for Freud’s views on women’s sexuality and how their development differs from men'. References Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being . American psychologist, 54(7), 462. Breuer, J., & Freud, S. (1895). Studies on hysteria. Standard Edition 2: London. Fisher, S., & Greenberg, R. P. (1996). Freud scientifically reappraised: Testing the theories and therapy. John Wiley & Sons. Freud, S. (1894). The neuro-psychoses of defence. SE, 3: 41-61. Freud, S. (1896). Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses of defence.

SE, 3: 157-185. Freud, S. (1900). The interpretation of dreams . S.E., 4-5. Freud, S. (1915). The unconscious. SE, 14: 159-204. Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 1-64. Freud, S. (1923). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1-66. Freud, S. (1925). Negation. Standard edition, 19, 235-239. Freud, S. (1961). The resistances to psycho-analysis. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (1923-1925): The Ego and the Id and other works (pp. 211-224). Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (1995). Implicit social cognition: attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes.

Psychological review, 102(1), 4. Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of experimental psychology, 18(6), 643. Tulving, E. (1972). Episodic and semantic memory. In E. Tulving & W. Donaldson (Eds.), Organization of Memory, (pp. 381–403). New York: Academic Press. How to cite this article: McLeod, S. A. (2013). Retrieved from Article Content Psychoanalysis - Glossary [Glossary of Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts] Abreaction: Psychotherapeutic method consisting in purging retained emotions through reviving of a traumatic passed event. Anxiety: A state of apprehension, uncertainty, and fear resulting from the anticipation of a realistic or fantasized threatening event or situation, often impairing physical and psychological functioning. Cathexis: points to the libidinal energy that is invested or attached to some object (person) outside the ego. Censorship: a kind of selective barrier between unconscious and conscious leading to repression.

Collective unconscious: the inherited part of the unconscious that especially in the psychoanalytic theory of Carl Jung occurs in and is shared by all the members of a people or race. Condensation: psychological unconscious process whereby two ideas or images combine into a single one bearing features from both (especially in dreams and fantasies). Condensation is part of the (->) primary process. Counter-transference : refers to the emotions of the analyst towards his patient. (-> transference). Death drive: a primitive impulse for destruction, decay, and death, coexisting with and opposing life instinct. Also called Thanatos. Defence mechanisms: Any of various usually unconscious mental processes, including denial, projection, rationalization, and repression, that protect the ego from shame, anxiety, conflict, loss of self-esteem, or other unacceptable feelings or thoughts. (-> More on defences here ). Displacement - Defence nechanism consisting in the transference of the affect from a representation to another, related to it. Distortion: refers to the dream formation and mainly to the fact that the manifest dream (-> see manifest content) differs from the -> latent thoughts (or dreams thoughts). Distortion is the work of the censorship ->.

Dream: product of unconscious psychic (->) primary process , the dream is in the Freud's view the fulfillment of a repressed wish (-> repression and repressed). Dreams are made by latent thoughts and manifest content (-> latent and manifest content). Dreams may be interpreted by using a specific method created by Freud and published in his Dream Interpretation book. (-> Dream interpretation). Dream-work : psychical process that leads to the formation of the dream, consisting in altering the latent thoughts or dream thoughts (-> latent content) into the (->) manifest content. The dream-work consists in (->) condensation, displacement, figurability, and secondary elaboration. Dream interpretation: the basic method of exploration of the unconscious, dream interpretation acquired with Freud a scientific shape. It mainly consists in gathering the associations of the dreamer related to the (->) manifest content. In the words of Freud, the dream interpretation is the reversal of the psychic process that leads to the formation of dreams (-> dream-work), and thus reaches the latent thoughts (-> latent content). The first historical dream interpreted by Freud himself is the the Irma's injection published in his Dream Interpretation [Traumdeutung] book (1900).

(A review of this book may be found here .) (-> See also the dream interpretation section in this site Drive: the word translates the German "Trieb" because it is closer to "impulse", "urge", than "instinct". A drive, in psychoanalysis, is a psychic tendency which assumes a biological source, an object of discharge, and a specific charge. Generally speaking, drives are linked with the sexual needs. Ego: one of the three divisions of the psyche in psychoanalytic theory that serves as the organized conscious mediator between the person and reality and person and the (->) id demands. Erotogenic (zones): any part of the body susceptible of becoming excited, of being a seat of pleasure. Freud used the term to refer primarily to a number of specific areas, notably, the genitals, mouth, and anus. Faulty acts: -> See slips and mistakes . First topic: topographic representation of the psychic apparatus which consist of three systems: unconscious, conscious, preconscious. -> See also the second topic. Free association: method of investigation of the unconscious in which the client expresses thoughts exactly as they occur, even though they may seem irrelevant to the critical mind.

(Read also the article on the free associations method here -> See also the golden rule of psychoanalysis). Golden rule of psychoanalysis: consists in saying everything that passes through one's mind without any conscious reasonable censorship when following a psychoanalytic cure. This rule may be also found in the free association method. (-> See the free association method). Guilt: a term denoting an unpleasant feeling associated with unfulfilled, repressed, wishes. (-> See also repression and repressed). Id: the one of the three divisions of the psyche in psychoanalytic theory that is completely unconscious and is the source of psychic energy. Latency period - a stage of (->) psychosexual development chatacyetized by the switch of the interest of the child from sexual to other aims. Latent content/thoughts: applied to the formation of dreams, refers to the thoughts related to the unconscious wishes that made the manifest content of dreams. (-> See also the manifest content.) Libido: quantitatively variable of the sexual excitation. Life drive: opposing (->) death drives, points to the life building and sustaining drives. It is characteristic of the sexual drives. It is also called Eros.

Manifest content: applied to the formation of dreams, points to the content of a dream that one remembers upon the waking. This is the facade of dream, the image or idea of it. (-> See also the latent content.) Neurosis: any of various mental or emotional disorders, such as hypochondria or neurasthenia, arising from no apparent organic lesion or change and involving symptoms such as insecurity, anxiety, depression, and irrational fears, but without psychotic symptoms such as delusions or hallucinations. Object level: in dream interpretation, refers to the object-relation method of interpretation. Images and ideas of dream's (->) manifest content are treated of like real images and ideas taken from the outer, social life, of the dreamer. Oedipal complex: an universal unconscious sexual wish in a child for the parent of the opposite sex, usually accompanied by hostility towards the parent of the same sex. (-> More on Oedipal complex here ). Parapraxes: -> See slips and mistakes . Primal scene: refers to the sight of sexual intercourse between the parents, as observed by the child and interpreted as a scene of violence. The scene is not understood in its sexual significance but provokes sexual excitement.

Primal fantasies: connotes those typical fantasy formations (such as observation of sexual intercourse between parents, seduction, castration) which, in Freud's hypothesis, are not directly experienced by the child but part of his/her phylogenetic inheritance. Primary/secondary processes: refers to the two modes of functioning of the psychic apparatus. The primary process points to the tendency of searching an immediate discharge of the inner excitation or the libidinal drive. It corresponds to the (->) id or the unconscious functioning. Subject of the (->) pleasure principle, it's main characteristic is the illogicalness. It is replaced later by the secondary process, characteristic of the conscious functioning and the logical thinking, consisting in regulating the inner demands. It is subject of the (->) reality principle.. Projection: the attribution of one's own attitudes, feelings, or desires to someone or something as an unconscious defence against anxiety or guilt. (-> See also the defence mechanisms.) Psychoanalytic techniques: methods of exploration of the unconscious psyche forged by psychoanalysis. Among them the most important are the (->) free associations method and the (->) dream interpretation.

(-> See also the techniques section on this site here .) Psychic determinism: states that all processes occurring in mind are not spontaneous and free as they seem, but governed by unconscious rules or complexes. For example: when one tries to speak freely about what it comes in his/her mind in relation to a word of his/her free choice, the lines of thoughts are related each other and focus on an unconscious psychic complex. (-> See also the unconscious.) Psychic energy: force or factor of emotional origin partially covering the term (->) libido. Psychosexual stages of development: in relation with the libido points to the progressive advancement of modes of obtaining sexual pleasure linked with the excitement of the (->) erogenous zones, starting from mouth and anus, and finishing with the genital one. There are actually four stages: oral, anal, phallic and genital. For each stage correspond specific modes of obtaining pleasure. (-> Learn more about the psychosexual stages here .) Reality/pleasure principles: the reality principle is one of the two major principles that govern the functioning of the mind.

It designates the psyche's necessary awareness of information concerning reality and stands in contradistinction to the pleasure/unpleasure principle, which seeks the discharge or elimination of drive tension at all costs. Repressed: is constituted by the operation of repression, which rejects and maintains in the unconscious representations deemed incompatible with the ego moral/superego moral values. The repressed is not directly knowable, since it pertains wholly to the unconscious sphere of the mind. -> See also the repression. Repression: the exclusion of distressing memories, thoughts, or feelings from the conscious mind. Often involving sexual or aggressive urges or painful childhood memories, these unwanted mental contents are pushed into the unconscious mind. -> See also the repressed. Return of the repressed: process whereby repressed elements, preserved in the unconscious, tend to reappear, in consciousness, in the shape of secondary and more or less unrecognizable "derivatives of the unconscious". Parapraxes, slips or symptomatic actions are examples of such derivatives. -> See also the slips and mistakes. Second topic: topographic representation of the psychic apparatus consisting of three agencies: id, ego, superego. -> See also the first topic.

Self-analysis: it is the analysis that one is submitted him/herself in order to reach the unconscious and the signification of symptoms. It is usually directed by a trained psychoanalyst (supervisor). It is made with the help of the psychoanalytic techniques such as dream interpretation, free associations etc. Self-analysis is required in the psychoanalysis training. The model of self-analysis is the Freud's one. -> Learn more about Freud's self analysis here . Slips and mistakes (Freudian): psychic unintentional acts (also called lapses) such us forgetting of names or objects, error of reading or writing, etc. that were analyzed by Freud and revealed links with unconscious psychic matters (complexes). -> See also the slip and mistakes section of this site here . Superego: the one of the three divisions of the psyche that is only partly conscious, represents internalization of parental interdictions and the rules of society. It is the moralizing and punishing instance in psyche. Transference: the process whereby emotions are passed on or displaced from one person to another; during psychoanalysis therapy the displacement of feelings toward others (usually the parents) is onto the analyst. Transference analysis is one of the basic methods in Freudian psychoanalysis.

-> More on transference here . Unconscious: the part of the psychic apparatus that does not ordinarily enter the individual's awareness but may be manifested by slips of the tongue, dreams, or neurotic symptoms. -> More on unconscious here . -- Several online resources: answer.com and webster dictionary. [More entries will be available soon, please join our newsletter to keep in touch with our news] or to the Home Page Sigmund Freud

Question: In psychoanalysis what word describes the 'death instinct'?
Answer: THANATOS