Concepts in psychoanalysis

Disciplines > Psychoanalysis > Concepts

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Psychoanalysis is a discipline in which there are many difficult and often-misunderstood concepts. Here are some straightforward explanations of many of them.

• Abjection: a state of deep and sickening horror.
• The chora: the initial chaotic state in a child's life.
• Counter-transference:  is the effect that transference has on a person.
• The depressive position: where good and bad are realized as one.
• Desire: a component of loss and lack.
• Good object, bad object: separating the comforting from the unpleasant.
• The good-enough mother: who supports healthy development.
• Identification: seeking to join with others.
• Incorporation: primitive taking into the body.
• Internalization: installation of objects in the ego.
• Introjective identification: taking another's good objects.
• Jouissance: pleasure too great to bear.
• Life and death drives: Eros and Thanatos.
• Mirror phase: image, self and misrecognition.
• Narcissism: exclusive self-love.
• The neonatal phase: early undifferentiated unity.
• Object: something to which a Subject relates.
• Object Relations Theory: relationships between people and their objects.
• Oedipus Complex: mother, son, father, complications.
• Other: Who is not the subject so creates the subject.
• The paranoid-schizoid position: paranoid fear and projecting bad objects.
• Phallus: A symbol of male power and female lack.
• Phantasy vs. fantasy: unconscious vs. conscious imaginings.
• Play: development and imagining.
• Pleasure-pain principle: seeking immediate gratification, avoiding discomfort.
• Projection and Introjection: taking in and pushing out objects.
• Projective identification: expelling a bad object into another person.
• Reality principle: Pragmatic deferral of pleasure.
• Splitting: separating one item into two so they can be handled separately.
• The Symbolic register: stage of acquiring language and symbols.
• Three registers of human reality: real, imaginary, symbolic.
• Transference: projecting one person's character onto another person.
• The Transition Object: not-me and carer-substitute that helps transition.
• True self, false self: healthy and not.

See also

Identity