Lecture Notes on Hysteria and Dream Analysis

Flashcards about Hysteria, Dream analysis, and Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory

Hysteria

Characterized by symptoms such as paralyses, contractions, odd movements, disturbances of vision, hearing, and smell, pains, anaesthesias, seizures, and many more; now known as ”conversion disorder” or “functional neurological disorder”.

Hysteria

A genuine illness that Jean-Martin Charcot established at Salpetrere in Paris, where he used hypnosis to bring about hysteria-like symptoms and observes that hysterical symptoms are based on concepts rather than physical abnormalities.

Anna O.

Bertha Pappenheim; cured her hysterical symptoms through the “cathartic method”.

Freud-Breuer theory of hysteria

An unconscious memory is a cause of the symptom, and this memory is unconscious due to an ongoing repression.

Conversion

Emotional energy finds expression as a symptom via an unconscious association of ideas that establishes a connection between the memory and the symptom.

Principle of constancy

The mind tries to keep the amount of energy constant by “disposing associatively of every sensible accretion of excitation or by discharging it by an appropriate motor reaction”.

Infantile sexuality

Even infants can express their sexuality (oral stage-anal stage-phallic stage-latency period -genital phase).

Fixation during each stages - ex

Smoking (oral fixation) excessive eating (oral fixation) control (anal fixation).

Freud began applying the psychoanalytic technique to dreams

Free associate with individual elements of the dream, interpret .

Dream content

What you actually experience in the dream.

Dream thoughts

Raw, unprocessed, unconscious thoughts, desires, or emotions that give rise to the dream.

Manifest content

Surface level of the dream

Latent content

The actual meaning of the dream

D1

All dreams are interpretable

D2

Dream distortion is the product of censorship and disguise

D3

All dreams are wish fulfillments

D5

The function of dreams is to preserve sleep

Two-agency theory

our minds split and conflict with each other-> the result of this conflict is censorship disguise .

wish-fulfillment

A dream is a (possibly disguised) fulfilment of a (possibly suppressed or repressed) wish

The dream- work

The process of going from latent content to manifest content

Condensation

numerous dream-thoughts are reduced to a smaller number of elements of the dream-content, through omission and fusion

Displacement 1

A dream thought is transformed into another thought on the basis of some similarity between them

Displacement 2

The psychical intensity of a dream thought is displaced to other thoughts

Considerations of representability

Abstract thoughts are turned into visual images or dramatic scenes

Symbolization

A dream thought is replaced by a symbol for it