Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is a body of theories and techniques for discovering unconscious mental processes and their influence on thought, emotion and behavior. It is a talk therapy and also a method of investigation, founded by Sigmund Freud in the early 1890s.

Its origins lie in Freud's clinical work with patients who showed hysterias, phobias and other psychological suffering with no apparent organic cause. He built on the earlier work of his mentor Josef Breuer and relied on careful clinical observation rather than laboratory experiment. For Freud, many symptoms had a hidden meaning that could be uncovered through conversation with the patient.

At the core of the theory is the claim that much of mental life is unconscious and that powerful drives, broadly understood as sexual in nature, shape behavior. These desires are usually repressed because they conflict with social norms and morality, and their disguised return appears in dreams, slips of the tongue and symptoms. Freud also proposed a structural model of the psyche made up of the id, ego and superego, and placed emotional development in successive stages, with the Oedipus complex as its central childhood episode.

As a therapy, psychoanalysis seeks to help the patient understand the unconscious causes of their distress. Through free association, the analyst interprets what emerges, and within the relationship transference appears, in which the patient transfers onto the analyst the emotional bonds of childhood. Freud summed up the aim with the phrase "Where id was, there ego shall be."

As a method of research, its concepts have been applied well beyond the clinic: to literature, film, myth and fairy tales, and to anthropology and ethnology, where scholars look for unconscious motives behind a culture's customs and rules.

Psychoanalysis has been controversial from the start. Its therapeutic effectiveness is debated, and so is its status as a science. After Freud, separate schools emerged, such as Alfred Adler's individual psychology and Carl Gustav Jung's analytical psychology, along with movements that reworked his ideas, including object relations theory, neo-Freudian thought and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Today its influence on psychiatry and psychotherapy is evident, although many of its hypotheses remain under debate.