Psychoanalysis Theory 

Psychoanalysis

• Introduction
• Sigmund Freud
• Major works
• The metapsychology of psychoanalysis
• Psychoanalysis as Psychotherapy                                                                                       

 Psychoanalysis is an independent discipline of the human sciences that was founded by the neurologist Sigmund Freud at the end of the 19th century in Vienna and has been continuously developed ever since. The ceaseless further development is already visible in the work of Freud himself, who throughout his life advanced, expanded and, if necessary, revised his concepts and theories.

Psychoanalysis has its own special examination method, a differentiated personality and developmental psychology (metapsychology), a comprehensive pathology derived from this and finally a treatment method that is used in the various forms of psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

As depth psychology, psychoanalysis is interested in the individual, always socially shaped, unconscious in humans. It essentially determines the perception, the interpretation and the way the individual deals with himself and his environment.

Psychoanalysis asks about the "why" and the "what for" of human experience and behavior. In doing so, she does not stop at the processing of the mostly childish unresolved experiences, as is sometimes criticized. She also examines their significant references in the entire biographical and also current experiences and their effects on the shaping of the future. It sensitizes people to use an “infinite analysis”, that is, constant questioning and reflection, to explore the meaning and meaning of their actions and life.

In this respect, psychoanalysis is a form of the incessant search for truth, as Freud put it. Today we speak more of a constant effort to gain knowledge and a never-ending questioning of the meaning of experience and behavior. Therein lies the emancipatory function of psychoanalysis.

By striving to uncover individual and collective self-deceptions, fallacies, illusions and perceptual distortions, she helps people to find touch with their depths and shallows. In this sense, it is also disturbing and uncomfortable. She must therefore always reckon with resistance and rejection. However, they must first be regarded as an individual or collective protective reaction, since psychoanalytic investigation cannot avoid shaking the always imperfect, provisional and unstable balance that every human being and society is constantly striving to establish and maintain.

Psychoanalysis as a scientific research method

The goal of psychoanalytic investigation is to understand, above all, the unconscious meanings of emotional experiences, interactions, thoughts, speech, actions and visual images (e.g. dreams, mistakes, fantasies, delusions, artistic products).

Insofar as it relates to social phenomena in the same way (for example: collective values, social trends, zeitgeist), psychoanalysis is also a cultural theory or culturally critical.

Psychoanalytic investigation consists in a special form of encounter between people. It is primarily a conversation, albeit one with certain rules of the game, different from ordinary communication. The basic psychoanalytic rule encourages the analysand to express everything that he senses, what he feels and what comes to mind  whether it is unpleasant, embarrassing or seems inappropriate and unimportant as unselected and uncensored as possible. The psychoanalyst attempts to meet these free associations with evenly suspended attention; that is, nothing is prioritized, weighted, or valued a priori. In so doing, the analyst enters into a state of greatest possible openness in his feeling, thinking and knowing, he tries to open up as much space as possible for the unconscious activity of the analysand and for himself. However, the freedom of the analysand's ideas is limited by the tension between many factors. These include his suffering, his desire for self-expression, his need for self-concealment, his transference, his resistance and the effort to preserve his hard-won mental balance.

However much an analyst may try to approach his analysand with attentive restraint (abstinence), it is inevitable that he will be distinguished by, for example, age, sex, the setting of his practice, the way he speaks, and much more Affected analysand. Conversely, every analysand triggers a wealth of inner movements in the analyst. It is therefore one of his constant tasks to differentiate his countertransference, that is, his mental reaction to the patient's offers of transference, from his own inevitable transference to his analysand and to recognize the latter as far as possible through reflection.

Transference is a phenomenon that is effective in all relationships, including all psychotherapeutic relationships of any type of therapy. It means that a current experience situation is unconsciously interpreted according to the pattern of an earlier one. In the pathological case, this means that a patient misunderstands the present (Greenson) according to his past to which he is fixated. The analyst acts as a screen of transmission in the analysand's phantasies, assuming certain roles of earlier relationships or representing aspects of the analysand's self. In the transference-countertransference scenes between the two, i.e. the initially largely unconscious reciprocal role expectations and assignments, old, above all unresolved and unresolved relationship constellations come to life again.

The specific relationship between analyst and analysand has become increasingly important, as psychoanalysis has developed. In therapeutic practice, this is expressed in the fact that the relationship between the two is taken into account as a possible form of expression of the patient's unconscious relationship conflicts and constellations. More and more importance is attached to the helpful relationship as a therapeutic tool.

All the unconscious forces and defense mechanisms that stand in the way of becoming conscious of what is repressed are called resistance. The patient's "free" ideas in the sense just described do not turn out to be accidental, but show the "determining order" of the unconscious. From a psychoanalytic point of view, “determinism” means that “everything has its meaning” and that the psychic present is shaped by the individual and collective past experience. Accordingly, the task of psychoanalysis consists in the “battle for memory” (Alexander Mitscherlich) against unconscious resistance, to make recognizable, to reconstruct and to interpret the unconscious biographical contexts of meaning and meaning in the current experience and behavior. As a community of experience, thought and speech, a psychoanalytic process essentially represents an attempt to expand and change perception.

The most important instrument of psychoanalytic investigation is the attentively involved psychoanalyst himself, with his reserve and a productive approach to his preconscious and unconscious. In addition to many years of theoretical and practical further training, he has completed several years of personal training analysis in order to prepare for this task. The analyst tries to be as open and empathetic as possible about the phenomena he is dealing with, to re-experience them and to classify them intellectually through understanding reflection.

In the dreams, mistakes, symptoms and other mental productions of people and in the ideas of the analysand, the analyst encounters the unconscious contents predominantly in a distorted, shifted and condensed form, in symbolic representation. They therefore require an interpretation. In a similar way to the patients' free associations, the psychoanalytic investigation also turns to the depth psychological interpretation of poetry, religious or mythological creations and other collective and social phenomena.

After all, since its beginnings as a science, psychoanalysis has continuously made itself the object of its analysis (e.g. in the formation of theories or with regard to further developments in treatment technology). In addition to her own research instrument, she also uses other methods, for example empirical methods, without completely submitting to the scientific zeitgeist of quantification. There is now a wealth of empirical and scientific evidence for the importance of certain psychoanalytic concepts and the efficiency of psychoanalytic treatments.

The metapsychology of psychoanalysis

Psychoanalytic theory is a complex system of hypotheses about the functioning and development of the mind. It is always about the individual, but always in his social context. Since unconscious content, like other mental phenomena, cannot usually be observed directly, models and hypothetical constructs are essential prerequisites and tools for grasping mental realities. Through constant interactions with clinical experience and the inclusion of research results from neighboring disciplines (for example: attachment theory, family therapy, brain research, constructivism, neurobiology, infant research), the mental models of psychoanalysis are constantly evolving. Thus, psychoanalytic metapsychology as a whole of theoretical concepts is not a self-contained system. In addition, the image of man and the "world view" of psychoanalysis is modified once again by the individual anthropological basic assumptions of each individual psychoanalyst. That is why it is actually impossible to speak of “psychoanalysis”. The American psychoanalyst Pine recently distinguished "four psychologies of psychoanalysis": drive psychology, ego psychology, and self-psychology and object relations psychology. They cannot be seamlessly mediated with one another; as a whole, however, they represent the currently most important psychoanalytic approaches to mental events.

In the following, we give a brief historical overview of different models of psychoanalysis:

In a first spatial, "topical" conceptual model, Freud distinguished between the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. While the preconscious (the unnoticed, the automatic, and the latent conscious) can become accessible to consciousness with relative ease, the intrinsic or dynamic unconscious resists becoming conscious. The functioning of the unconscious is called primary process. This means that the usual orientations in space and time are lost, contradictions can exist side by side, parts can stand for the whole, shifts can occur or complexes can be condensed. All rational logic is switched off. Dreams are formed, for example, by means of such primary process-like thought processes. The unconscious can only be made conscious to a very limited extent ​​if at all but it has a serious effect on the subject's behavior and experience and the way he forms his relationships.

The dynamic or economic model captures the fact that there are forces and drives at work in mental life (needs, desires, affects, sensations, energies, impulses) that are subject to certain laws. Above all, it emphasizes the shaping of experience and behavior by drives or motivational systems (e.g. sexuality, aggression, narcissism). Freud contrasted the pleasure principle (striving for pleasure and avoiding pain) with the reality principle (ability to postpone gratification and renunciation). In addition, modern ego psychology has emphasized the principle of security (striving for security and well-being in narcissistic equilibrium) and the intersubjective theory (Benjamin) the principle of mutual reflection and recognition as fundamental principles of regulation of psychological events.

In the structural or instance model, three areas of the soul are separated from one another and examined in their dynamic interaction: the ego, the id and the superego (with the ego ideal). The ego, which has been researched and described in a differentiated manner by ego psychology, with its regulation, coping, adaptation and defense mechanisms, serves to organize, control, control and mediate and coordinate the authorities (inner reality) with the environment (external reality).

In the id, in addition to innate parts, the drives, needs and basic affects and what is repressed from consciousness are localized in particular. The id is sometimes equated with the unconscious.

The super-ego includes above all the moral demands, regulations and prohibitions of the world around us that have been internalized during development, while the ego ideal contains the commands, ideals and values. The superego has, among other things, the functions of conscience and self-observation (Freud), has an ego-supporting and stabilizing effect, but also acts as a judge, critic and censor. Both the ego and the superego consist in part of unconscious areas.

From a genetic point of view (as developmental psychology), psychoanalysis examines how phase-specific psychosocial developmental challenges and crises are lived through. Depending on their successful or unsuccessful course, their successful or unsuccessful attempts and solutions, they lead to certain dimensions of identity (Erikson), to ego maturity or to mental illness. For psychoanalysis since Freud, development has always been a biographical agreement between “inner” (biological) and “external” (social and cultural) nature in the sense of a supplementary series. The interaction of innate parts and a resonant (responding) or non-resonant environment can either promote the given potential of an individual to its development or disturb it in the direction of a mental illness.

Psychoanalysis as Psychotherapy

The topicality and importance of psychoanalysis as a form of psychotherapy results above all from its highly differentiated and comprehensive development and personality theory and its pathology. No psychoanalyst claims to be able to offer psychotherapy for all mental or psychosomatic illnesses. The psychoanalyst is also extremely careful with the term “healing”. However, psychoanalysis claims to be able to make a fundamental contribution to the understanding of mental illnesses and their treatment through other psychotherapeutic methods, for example as psychoanalytic supervision in clinical institutions.

Psychoanalytic therapy is preceded by one or more preliminary talks, so-called initial clinical interviews. They differ from a medical anamnesis or psychiatric exploration in that they are intentionally unstructured, which tries to offer the patient's psychic dynamics in the analysand-analyst relationship as much freedom as possible. In principle, the psychoanalyst's attention is not primarily focused on "objective" facts, but rather on the subjective significance that what is expressed in words or in physical or gestural expressions or what is kept secret has for mental reality. On the one hand, the initial consultations are used for diagnosis and indication, for example for financing by a health insurance company. On the other hand, they also lead to a "subjective" indication, in other words to answering the question of whether a specific patient is able to enter into a productive therapeutic process of treatment and change with a specific analyst.

In addition to classic psychoanalysis (several hours per week using the couch), the range of psychoanalytic treatment offered in the outpatient setting includes various modifications. Psychoanalytic and psychoanalytically based psychotherapy are characterized by changes in the "setting" (e.g. lower frequency of sessions, sitting opposite) and methodological modifications. Psychotherapy based on depth psychology as a psychoanalytically based treatment method is a form of therapy based on psychoanalysis, limited to certain conflict issues and limited in time. It can therefore be practiced in the most qualified way by psychoanalysts. In psychoanalytic short or focal therapies, certain focal points or core conflicts are subjected to psychotherapeutic treatment that is concentrated in terms of time and content. Couples are treated in psychoanalytic couples therapy, groups in psychoanalytic group psychotherapy and families in psychoanalytically oriented family therapy. In the meantime, psychoanalytic treatment concepts have also been developed for older people. Finally, psychoanalytic treatment techniques are also used in inpatient settings.