Key Concepts of Psychoanalytic Therapy

Resistance

Any idea, attitude, feeling, or action that fosters the status quo and impedes change in therapy.

Transference Relationship

Central in psychoanalysis, it involves the client projecting feelings associated with significant figures from the past onto the therapist.

Ego-Defense Mechanisms

Psychological strategies that protect the ego from anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.

Play Therapy

A therapeutic approach using play to help children express unconscious thoughts and emotions.

Dream Analysis

The process of interpreting dreams to uncover unconscious motives, wishes, and fears.

Projective Tests

Psychological tests that explore the unconscious mind by presenting ambiguous stimuli for interpretation.

Levels of the Mind

Include conscious, preconscious, unconscious, and collective unconscious aspects.

Provinces of the Mind

Involves the id, ego, and superego as key components of personality according to psychoanalytic theory.

Dynamics of Personality

Involves life and death instincts, shaping behavior and psychological responses.

Rorschach Inkblot Test

A widely used projective test involving interpreting inkblots to identify emotional responses.

Psychoanalytic Therapy

Therapists see psychological problems as rooted in the unconscious mind, often related to sex and aggression, and caused by latent disturbances like unresolved issues or repressed trauma.

Free Association

A therapy tool where clients state the first word that comes to mind in response to a stimulus, accessing unconscious thoughts.

Freudian Slips

Errors or lapses in memory that reveal suppressed or repressed thoughts or desires.

Therapeutic Goals

In psychoanalytic therapy, the aims include making the unconscious conscious and strengthening the ego for more reality-based behavior.

TAT Test

Thematic Apperception Test, a projective test using ambiguous pictures to reveal manifest and latent content.

Word Association

A controlled association technique where subjects respond with the first word that comes to mind to a series of presented words.

Brief Psychodynamic Therapy (BPT)

An adapted psychodynamic therapy for selective disorders, applying key concepts in a preestablished number of sessions.