Psychoanalysis
Related: psychoanalytical film theory - psychiatry
Definition
Psychoanalysis is the revelation of unconscious relations, in a systematic way through an associative process. The fundamental subject matter of psychoanalysis is the unconscious patterns of life revealed through the analysand's (the patient's) free associations. The analyst 's goal is to help liberate the analysand from unexamined or unconscious barriers of transference and resistance, that is, past patterns of relatedness that are no longer serviceable or that inhibit freedom.
Psychoanalysis was first devised in Vienna in the 1890s by Sigmund Freud, a doctor interested in finding an effective treatment for patients with neurotic or hysterical symptoms. As a result of talking with these patients Freud came to believe that their problems stemmed from culturally unacceptable, thus repressed and unconscious desires and fantasies of a sexual nature. Since Freud's day psychoanalysis has developed in many ways, and there are various different schools as well.
Today psychoanalytic ideas are imbedded in the culture, especially in childcare, education, literary criticism, and in psychiatry, particularly medical and non-medical psychotherapy. Though there is a mainstream of evolved analytic ideas, there are groups who more specifically follow the precepts of one or more of the later theoreticians.
In the past two decades psychoanalysis has experienced a global 'crisis' of popularity. This is largely due to the proliferation of alternative psychotherapies and to the exponential increase in the pharmaceutical treatment of mental disorders. It is also undoubtedly due in part to the inherent unpopularity of certain elements of traditional psychoanalysis, such as the Freudian attitude to homosexuality. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoanalysis [May 2004]
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