W. W. Norton & Company | The Personality Puzzle, 4th ed.

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Chapter 10: Basics of Psychoanalysis

Unlike many approaches to personality, the psychoanalytic approach concentrates on the cases where the cause of behavior is mysterious and hidden.

Psychoanalytic theory is based on a small number of key ideas, including psychic determinism, the three-part internal structure of the mind, mental energy, and psychic conflict.

Psychoanalysis has been controversial throughout its history, although the nature of the controversy has changed with the times. Freud was one of the geniuses of the twentieth century.

Freud's psychoanalytic theory posits two fundamental motives: a life drive, or libido, and a drive toward death and destruction.

Libido produces psychic energy, and the story of psychological development is the story of how this energy is focused in different areas over the course of four stages of life.

Each developmental stage has a physical focus, a psychological theme, and an adult character type that results if the stage of development does not go well. The main issue for the oral stage is dependency; for the anal stage it is obedience and self-control; for the phallic stage it is gender identity and sexuality; and for the genital stage it is maturity, in which one ideally learns to balance "love and work."

The different structures of the mind form during progression through these developmental stages. The newborn baby is "all id." The ego develops at the anal stage as a result of experiences with frustration and delay, and the superego develops at the phallic stage as a result of identifications with significant people, especially the parents. Fixation occurs when an individual gets to some degree psychologically "stuck" in a stage of development; regression is movement backward from a more advanced psychological stage to an earlier one.

Primary process thinking, assumed by Freud to be present in babies and in the unconscious part of the adult mind, is unconscious thought characterized by association, displacement, symbolism, and an irrational drive toward immediate gratification.

Secondary process thinking, which develops as the child moves toward adulthood, is ordinary, rational, conscious thought.

The three layers of consciousness are the conscious mind, the preconscious, and the unconscious. Freud thought the conscious mind was by far the smallest of the three.

Psychoanalytic therapy is performed through techniques such as dream analysis and free association in the context of a therapeutic alliance between patient and therapist. The goal is to bring the unconscious thoughts that are the source of an individual's problems into the open, so the conscious, rational mind can deal with them.