First laid out by Sigmund Freud in the late 19th century (particularly in his 1899 book The Interpretation of Dreams), psychoanalytic theory has undergone many refinements since his work.
The psychoanalytic theory came to full prominence in the last third of the twentieth century as part of the flow of critical discourse regarding psychological treatments after the 1960s, long after Freud's death in 1939.
[3] Psychoanalysis is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as A therapeutic method, originated by Sigmund Freud, for treating mental disorders by investigating the interaction of conscious and unconscious elements in the patient's mind and bringing repressed fears and conflicts into the conscious mind, using techniques such as dream interpretation and free association.
Observations in the Anna O. case led Freud to theorize that the problems faced by hysterical patients could be associated with painful childhood experiences that could not be recalled.
However, the content of the unconscious is only knowable to consciousness through its representation in a disguised or distorted form, by way of dreams and neurotic symptoms, as well as in slips of the tongue and jokes.
Freud viewed the unconscious as a repository for socially unacceptable ideas, anxiety-producing wishes or desires, traumatic memories, and painful emotions put out of consciousness by the mechanism of repression.
Unconscious thoughts are not directly accessible to ordinary introspection, but they are capable of partially evading the censorship mechanism of repression in a disguised form, manifesting, for example, as dream elements or neurotic symptoms.
The ego balances demands of the id, the superego, and of reality to maintain a healthy state of consciousness, where there is only minimal intrapsychic conflict.
It thus reacts to protect the individual from stressors and from anxiety by distorting internal or external reality to a lesser or greater extent.
The ten different defence mechanisms initially enumerated by Anna Freud[11] are: repression, regression, reaction formation, isolation of affect, undoing, projection, introjection, turning against the self, reversal into the opposite, and sublimation.
The most important theorists are Erik Erikson (Psychosocial Development), Anna Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler and Karen Horney, and including the school of object relations.
The stages are trust vs. mistrust, autonomy vs. shame, initiative vs. guilt, industry vs. inferiority, identity vs. confusion, intimacy vs. isolation, generatively vs. stagnation, and integrity vs. despair.
[18][19][20][21] Other philosophers such as Alain Badiou and Rafael Holmberg have argued that the meaning of psychoanalysis for philosophy was not immediately clear, but that they have come to reciprocally define each other.