Inside Lives: Psychoanalysis and the Growth of the Personality

Vocabulary flashcards covering key psychoanalytic concepts, theories, and terminology from Margot Waddell's 'Inside Lives: Psychoanalysis and the Growth of the Personality'.

Psychical Analysis

The term first applied by Sigmund Freud in March 1896 to describe the therapeutic treatment he offered to disturbed patients.

Tavistock Clinic

A mental health and post-graduate training institution in Britain founded in 1920 whose clinical approaches are strongly influenced by psychoanalysis and systemic family therapy.

Object Relations Approach

A psychoanalytic framework tracing development from self-survival anxiety to concern for others, emphasizing the primary significance of emotional relationships between self and other.

Post-Kleinian

A designation for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists who build upon or elaborate Melanie Klein's theoretical framework in clinical practice.

States of Mind / Positions

Melanie Klein's term for mental attitudes or perspectives through which an individual views themselves and their relationships with the world at any given time.

Paranoid-schizoid Position

An early infantile state of mind characterized by persecutory anxiety, exclusive self-concern, and split functioning that experiences people and events in extreme good or bad terms.

Depressive Position

A developmental position characterized by experiencing others as separate whole individuals, stirring feelings of concern, remorse, guilt, and a desire to make reparation.

Ps-D Formulation

Wilfred Bion's representation of continuous, moment-by-moment movement between the paranoid-schizoid (Ps) and depressive (D) positions, where developmental moves involve temporary internal disruption.

Oedipal Feelings (Infancy)

An infant or young child's early longing for sole possession of one parent to the exclusion of the other, giving rise to intense feelings of jealousy and fear of displacement.

Unconscious Phantasy

Melanie Klein's concept of the continuous, active inner mental life present even outside conscious awareness, shaping human experience through thoughts, fears, and desires.

Thinking Breast

Wilfred Bion's metaphor for the maternal mental function that receives, organizes, and gives shape to an infant's rudimentary impulses and sensations.

Reverie

Wilfred Bion's term for the mother's unconsciously receptive state of mind capable of receiving, modulating, and returning an infant's emotional projections in a tolerable form.

Container / Contained

Bion's model for processing emotional experience in which the mother (container) mentally holds and transforms the infant's fragmentary emotions and impulses (contained).

Alpha-function

The unconscious mental process that converts raw sense impressions into meaningful alpha-elements, forming the basis for symbol-formation, dreaming, and thinking.

Beta-elements

Raw, undigested sense impressions and emotional data that have not yet been transformed into meaningful thoughts by alpha-function.

Nameless Dread

Wilfred Bion's term for the terrifying state experienced by an infant when its projected fear of dying is rejected by the mother and reintrojected stripped of meaning.

Second-skin Defence

Esther Bick's concept of a primitive defence mechanism where an infant clings to sensory or muscular focus (adhesive identification) to hold the personality together in the absence of psychic containment.

Weaning

The concrete prototype for separation and loss, requiring the infant to relinquish sole possession of the mother and negotiate triangular relationships.

Projective Identification

A psychological defence mechanism where unbearable or disowned aspects of the self are unconsciously projected into another person and identified with there.

Latency

The period roughly corresponding to primary school years (ages 5 to 11) during which early sexual and Oedipal passions remain dormant while the child gathers emotional and social skills.

Sublimation

Freud's concept of diverting instinctual sexual and aggressive energy towards non-sexual, intellectual, or socially valuable aims.

Reaction Formation

A defence mechanism where unacceptable instinctual impulses are transformed into their exact opposites, such as turning the desire to soil into a drive to clean and order.

K Link

Wilfred Bion's designation for a state of mind driven by a genuine desire to know and understand the emotional truth of experience.

-K Link

Bion's term for a state of mind that actively strips emotional experience of its true meaning, treating knowledge as a commodity or tool for superiority and control.

Epistemophilic Instinct

Melanie Klein's concept of the fundamental human urge or desire to explore, know, and understand truth and experience.

Acting Out

The replacement of thought and reflection by direct action or behaviour in order to reduce or evade internal emotional conflict.

Negative Capability

John Keats's concept, adopted by Bion, describing the capacity to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without an irritable reaching after fact and reason.