Knowra Psychoanalytic theory Psychoanalytic theory Psychoanalytic theory explains mental life and behavior through unconscious processes, internal conflict, early relationships, and childhood experience.
Unconscious mind : Mental processes and contents that are not currently available to conscious awareness. Psychoanalytic theory treats unconscious wishes and conflicts as forces shaping thought and behavior.
Repression : An unconscious defense that keeps distressing thoughts or wishes from conscious awareness. Repression is a central account of how unacceptable mental contents become unconscious.
Sigmund Freud : An Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis and developed influential theories of unconscious mental life. Freud originated the framework and many of its defining concepts.
Behaviorism : A psychological approach that explains behavior through observable actions and learning, rather than inferred unconscious motives. Behaviorism rejects the theory’s reliance on unconscious mental explanations.
Psychological conflict : A clash among motives, beliefs, feelings, or demands within a person. Symptoms can express conflicts among wishes, prohibitions, and defenses.
Dream interpretation : The interpretation of dreams as expressions of psychological meaning, often involving disguised wishes or conflicts. Freud treated dreams as a route for investigating unconscious mental life.
Anna O. : The pseudonym of Bertha Pappenheim, a patient whose treatment became an influential early case in psychoanalysis. Her case helped shape the talking-cure narrative associated with psychoanalytic origins.
Cognitive psychology : The scientific study of mental processes such as attention, memory, language, and reasoning. It investigates mental processes with methods and models distinct from classical psychoanalysis.
Psychosexual development : Freud’s theory that childhood development passes through stages organized around changing sources of bodily pleasure. Freud used childhood stages to explain lasting patterns of personality and conflict.
Free association : A method in which a person reports thoughts as they arise, without deliberate selection or censorship. It is used to uncover associations and conflicts that ordinary deliberate speech may conceal.
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