What is Psychodynamic Therapy?

Psychoanalysis is how the mind works. Freud worked on psychoanalysis. He believed that some mental illness that don’t have a biological cause would have a cause in the unconscious 

Freud believed there are three aspects of a person’s personality, Id ego and super ego.

Id is the part of your personality which is focused on satisfying your basic needs such as sex and food. It works on the pleasure principle. You must satisfy your needs as soon as possible to avoid feeling uncomfortable or in tension. A baby is fully run on the id as they are purely acting on instinct It is present from birth. 

The ego is later to develop – within the first three years of life. A person’s ego also wants to have pleasure and have needs met but in a more realistic and socially acceptable way. You can delay the satisfaction, to conform to social acceptance. Therefore, the need is still being met but in a more realistic way. 

Finally, there is the super ego which develops between the ages of 3 and 5. This is when people first start learning what is right and wrong from care givers. The super ego is made up of the conscience and the super ideal. The conscience holds us accountable to the ideas that are accepted by society. Super ideal is the things that we deem as good. This is not a person being good, you are simply acting in a way which is pleasing to the society you are in.

A healthy personality is a balance between id, ego and superego. If id was dominant this would result in a more impulsive personality type. An ego dominated person relies on the societal ideas of good and bad. A dominant Superego would result in a person more judgemental as your morals might be different from other that you meet. 

Freud proposed that psychological development in childhood takes place during five stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. He named them the psychosexual stages of development because each stage represents the fixation of the libido on a different area of the body. Libido here means sexual drives or instincts. 

Oral stage (Birth to 1 year). The libido is centred around the baby’s mouth. Babies get much satisfaction from putting things into their mouth. Freud suggested this satisfied the sucking libido. If you don’t go through the stage correctly this could lead to an oral fixation later in life e.g. addiction to smoking, nail biting, or  finger chewing.

Anal stage (1-3 years). Libido is now focused on the anus. Child derives great pleasure from defecating. Parent puts restriction on the child’s as to where and when they can defecate. The nature of this first conflict with authority can determine the child future relationship with all forms of authority Early or harsh potty training can lead to an anal-retentive personality. Later in life the child might become obsessively tidy, punctual, respectful of authority, stubborn or tight. Liberal toilet training regime can lead to anal expulsive personality type i.e. likes giving away, messy, disorganised or rebellious. 

Phallic stage (3-6 years). The libido is now focused on the genitals and masturbation. Child becomes aware of anatomical differences. Which elicits feelings of erotic attraction, resentment, rivalry, jealousy and fear. Boys and girls navigate this stage differently.  

The Oedipus complex states that the boy develops sexual desire for his mum. He wants to possess his mother completely and get rid of his father. Irrationally the boy thinks that if his father were to find out about his, the father would take away the thing that he loves the most. His penis. To avoid this the little boy start imitating the masculinity of his father. Resolved when the boy takes on the masculine gender role

The Electra complex states that briefly the girl desires the father but realises that she doesn’t have a penis. Which leads to development of penis envy. The girl blames the mum for not giving her a penis. The girl replaces the wish for a penis with the wish for a baby . Resolved by girl represses her feelings, identifies with mother and takes on the female gender role. 

Unsuccessfully resolution of the phallic stage would result in an unhealthy fixation. Boys becoming fixated on their mothers and girls becoming fixated on their fathers, causing them to choose romantic partners that resemble their opposite-sex parent as adults.

Latency Stage ( 6 years to puberty). No further psychosexual development takes place here. The libido is dormant. Sexual impulses are repressed. Sexual energy can be sublimated to…

School work, Hobbies or Friendship 

During puberty to early twenties individuals go through the genital stage. This is a stage full of sexual experimentation. The correct resolution is settling down in your 20’s with a person of the opposite sex. An unsuccessful resolution of this stage would mean you are constantly in the sexual experimentation stage 

Another of Freuds theories state that there are three parts of one’s mind; conscious, preconscious and unconscious. 

Freud used an iceberg to represent these three parts of the mind. The majority of an iceberg lies beneath the water. The visible, knowable, part of your mind is the conscious mind, like the bit above the iceberg. Conscious mind contains all of the things that you are presently aware of. However even though you believe that this is the part of the mind that is running the show, it is only a small fraction of what is really going on. Just beneath the surface of the iceberg, which you can still see through the surface of the water represents the preconscious. Within the preconscious there are things that you can bring to your conscious mind, but they are not constantly within the conscious mind. The unconscious part of your mind contains everything else. There are things in there that you are unaware of. Here you will store your guilty things, all the things that you do not want to remain conscious or preconscious. We don’t have the ability to recall the unconscious, but it still has an impact or effect upon us. It is a collection of all the things that we are unable to sort out. The unconscious comes out in Freudian slips, hypnotherapy and dreams. You may be able to bring it up by writing the first thing that comes to your mind when presented with a stimulus. As discussed, there are various ways to bring up the unconscious to confront it. Psychoanalysis is the action of bringing repressed unconscious material into the conscious mind. 

Dreams according to Freud 

Freud believed that dreamlife is as important to everyday life as daytime. He believed that within every dream there is a wish; a dream is a repressed wish from childhood. The way that we can reveal the wish is by analysing the latent content of the dream. The latent content is hidden by a number of processes. One such method is through  representation; this is the phenomenon of your thoughts being turned into images in your dreams. There is also symbolising. For example, Freud believed that when repressed sexual content is expressed in a dream it strips the explicitness from the content. This gives the individual a manageable way to deal with the emotions which have been suppressed. 

Dreams according to Carl Yung 

Yung had a great deal more of a spiritual idea about dreams. Carl Yung was a Swiss psychiatrist born in 1875. He was particularly interested in schizophrenia. His patients would often report their dreams to him spontaneously, interpretations of these dreams came from the patient themselves. Yung avoided all theoretical interpretation of dreams. Yung believed that dreams are not invented consciously but occur spontaneously. Yung felt that dreams are always trying to express something important that the unconscious is trying to say.