Brief overview of Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a therapy based on the observation that individuals are often unaware of many of the factors that determine their emotions and behaviour. Developed by Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis suggests these unconscious factors may create unhappiness, sometimes in the form of recognizable symptoms and at other times as troubling personality traits, difficulties in work or in love relationships, or disturbances in mood and self-esteem. Because these forces are unconscious, the advice of friends and family, the reading of self-help books, or even the most determined efforts of will, often fail to provide relief.
Psychoanalytic treatment demonstrates how these unconscious factors affect current relationships and patterns of behaviour, traces them back to their historical origins, shows how they have changed and developed over time, and helps the individual to deal better with the realities of life.
Psychoanalysis has generated many terms and 'taken-for-granted' ideas that are today a part of general language. Freud breaks the mind up into the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is the primitive driving force behind needs such as sexual satisfaction and social advancement. The superego is packed with all the moral codes imprinted on us since birth, and the ego is our conscious mind which motivates us to make decisions based on our specific drives and needs.
Because the superego and the id are constantly in conflict, many people are driven to psychoanalysis by an overworked ego struggling to make sense of the world around it. Using this psychoanalysis model, criminal behavior occurs when the id becomes too dominant and ultra-rigid moral behavior is triggered by an unchecked superego.
Practitioners of psychoanalysis hope to use this information along with other observations to formulate a possible course of treatment for certain mental illnesses or other self-limiting neuroses or irrational fears.
Trained psychologists or psychotherapists attempt to get at the root causes of a patient's current behavior or actions, usually through a number of face-to-face sessions in which the patient is asked to remember specific memories of life-altering events - a process known as free association.
Dream Analysis
A popular offshoot of psychoanalysis is dream analysis. Dream analysis, in psychoanalysis, provides the possibility to decipher the mystery of neurotic disorders, specifically hysteria, and secondly, it opens the road towards unconscious. Freud's phrase: "The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious" has become famous.
It was in his book The Interpretation of Dreams that Sigmund Freud first argued that the foundation of all dream content is wish-fulfilment, and that the instigation of a dream is always to be found in the events of the day preceding the dream. In the case of very young children, Freud claimed, this can be easily seen, as small children dream quite straightforwardly of the fulfilment of wishes that were aroused in them the previous day (the 'dream day').
In adults, however, the situation is more complicated - since in Freud's submission, the dreams of adults have been subjected to distortion, with the dream's so-called 'latent content' being a heavily disguised derivative of the 'manifest' dream-thoughts present in the unconscious. As a result of this distortion and disguise, the dream's real significance is concealed.