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Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis, method of treating mental disorders, shaped by psychoanalytic theory,
which emphasizes unconscious mental processes and is sometimes described as “depth
psychology.” The psychoanalytic movement originated in the clinical observations and
formulations of Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, who coined the term psychoanalysis.
During the 1890s, Freud worked with Austrian physician and physiologist Josef Breuer in
studies of neurotic patients under hypnosis. Freud and Breuer observed that, when the
sources of patients’ ideas and impulses were brought into consciousness during the hypnotic
state, the patients showed improvement.

Observing that most patients talked freely without being under hypnosis, Freud evolved the
technique of free association of ideas. The patient was encouraged to say anything that
came to mind, without regard to its assumed relevancy or propriety. Noting that patients
sometimes had dif culty in making free associations, Freud concluded that certain painful
experiences were repressed, or held back from conscious awareness. Freud noted that in the
majority of the patients seen during his early practice, the events most frequently repressed
were concerned with disturbing sexual experiences. Thus he hypothesized that anxiety was a
consequence of the repressed energy (libido) attached to sexuality; the repressed energy
found expression in various symptoms that served as psychological defense mechanisms.
Freud and his followers later extended the concept of anxiety to include feelings of fear, guilt,
and shame consequent to fantasies of aggression and hostility and to fear of loneliness
caused by separation from a person on whom the sufferer is dependent.

Freud’s free-association technique provided him with a tool for studying the meanings of
dreams, slips of the tongue, forgetfulness, and other mistakes and errors in everyday life.
From these investigations he was led to a new conception of the structure of personality: the
id, ego, and superego. The id is the unconscious reservoir of drives and impulses derived
from the genetic background and concerned with the preservation and propagation of life.
The ego, according to Freud, operates in conscious and preconscious levels of awareness. It is
the portion of the personality concerned with the tasks of reality: perception, cognition, and
executive actions. In the superego lie the individual’s environmentally derived ideals and
values and the mores of his family and society; the superego serves as a censor on the ego
functions.

In the Freudian framework, con icts among the three structures of the personality are
repressed and lead to the arousal of anxiety. The person is protected from experiencing
anxiety directly by the development of defense mechanisms, which are learned through
family and cultural in uences. These mechanisms become pathological when they inhibit
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pursuit of the satisfactions of living in a society. The existence of these patterns of adaptation
or mechanisms of defense are quantitatively but not qualitatively different in the psychotic
and neurotic states.

Freud held that the patient’s emotional attachment to the analyst represented a
transference of the patient’s relationship to parents or important parental gures. Freud held
that those strong feelings, unconsciously projected to the analyst, in uenced the patient’s
capacity to make free associations. By objectively treating these responses and the
resistances they evoked and by bringing the patient to analyze the origin of those feelings,
Freud concluded that the analysis of the transference and the patient’s resistance to its
analysis were the keystones of psychoanalytic therapy.

Early schisms over such issues as the basic role that Freud ascribed to biological instinctual
processes caused onetime associates Carl Jung, Otto Rank, and Alfred Adler to establish their
own psychological theories. Most later controversies, however, were over details of Freudian
theory or technique and did not lead to a complete departure from the parent system. Other
in uential theorists have included Erik Erikson, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Harry Stack
Sullivan. At one time psychiatrists held a monopoly on psychoanalytic practice, but soon
nonmedical therapists also were admitted.

Later developments included work on the technique and

theory of psychoanalysis of children. Freud’s tripartite
division of the mind into id, ego, and superego became
progressively more elaborate, and problems of anxiety
and female sexuality received increasing attention.
Psychoanalysis also found many extraclinical
applications in other areas of social thought, particularly
anthropology and sociology, and in literature and the
psychoanalytic theory: Sigmund
arts.
Freud and Carl Jung lectures

In July and September 1909, Austrian Freud’s article on psychoanalysis appeared in the 13th
neurologist Sigmund Freud and Swiss
psychologist and psychiatrist Carl Jung edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
presented a series of lectures on
psychoanalytic theory at Clark University This article was most recently revised and updated by
in Worcester, Massachusetts. Shown in
this September 10, 1909, photo are, from
Kara Rogers, Senior Editor.
left to right in the front row, Sigmund
Freud, G. Stanley Hall, and Carl Jung,
and from left to right in the back row,
Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones, and
Sándor Ferenczi.

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Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-

USZ62-94957)

CITATION INFORMATION
ARTICLE TITLE: Psychoanalysis
WEBSITE NAME: Encyclopaedia Britannica
PUBLISHER: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
DATE PUBLISHED: 22 February 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/science/psychoanalysis
ACCESS DATE: November 24, 2019

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