Freud Lexicon (Slides) Flashcards
Oedipus Complex
an universal unconscious sexual wish in a child for the parent of the opposite sex, usually accompanied by hostility towards the parent of the same sex.
Latent Content
The thoughts related to the unconscious wishes that made the manifest content of dreams.
Manifest Content
Points to the content of a dream that one remembers upon the waking. This is the facade of dream, the image or idea of it.
Condensation
psychological unconscious process whereby two ideas or images combine into a single one bearing features from both (especially in dreams and fantasies)
Displacement
Defence mechanism consisting in the transference of the affect from a representation to another, related to it.
“the redirection of an impulse (usually aggression) onto a powerless substitute target. The target can be a person or an object that can serve as a symbolic substitute.”
examples: “Someone who feels uncomfortable with their sexual desire for a real person may substitute a fetish. Someone who is frustrated by his or her superiors may go home and kick the dog.”
Overdetermination
Refers to all provoking causes of a hysterical symptom. Or, symptoms can/probably/usually have multiple causations.
Repression
the exclusion of distressing memories, thoughts, or feelings from the conscious mind. Often involving sexual or aggressive urges or painful childhood memories, these unwanted mental contents are pushed into the unconscious mind.
Instincts
A pre-lingual bodily impulse that drives our actions.
Instinct is outside of knowing.
There are two classes of instincts: 1) Eros or the sexual instincts and 2) Thanatos or the death-instinct
Pleasure Principle
Tells us to do whatever feels good
Return of the Repressed
process whereby repressed elements, preserved in the unconscious, tend to reappear, in consciousness, in the shape of secondary and more or less unrecognizable “derivatives of the unconscious”. Parapraxes, slips or symptomatic actions are examples of such derivatives.
Reaction-Formation
When you feel an urge to do or say something and then actually do or say the opposite.
It also appears as a defense against a feared social punishment. May result in exaggerated actions.
Anxiety
A state of apprehension, uncertainty, and fear resulting from the anticipation of a realistic or fantasized threatening event or situation, often impairing physical and psychological functioning.
Mourning
One of two possible responses to loss. Mourning is conscious and healthy.
Melancholia
One of two possible responses to loss. Unconscious and unhealthy.
Separation from an object of attachment remains incomplete. Instead of retracting the libido invested with the lost object and redirecting it to another object its excess libido is driven inwards. Part of the person identifies with the lost person, resulting in an inner division.
Ego
The ego develops in order to mediate between the unrealistic id and the external real world. It is the decision making component of personality.
Identification
The earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person.
Eg., in the Oedipus Complex, the little boy identifies with the father.
Ambivalence
The simultaneous presence of love and hate toward an object.
Eg. A child finds pleasure in touching themselves but finds that the act is prohibited. They may continue to touch, but they’ll hate the act as they perform it.
Narcissism
“Loving oneself,” Freud argues, is the “libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation” (On Narcissism)
Cathexis
Somewhere between intense attention and obsession
The energy you direct in desire
Reality Principle
Tells us to subordinate pleasure to what needs to be done, work
Sublimation
Subordination of the pleasure Principle to the reality Principle
Where you take desired that can’t/shouldn’t be fulfilled and turn that energy into something productive
Parapraxes
Slips of the tongue that reveal something that has been repressed
Primary Narcissism
The basic, sexually charged desire directed at the self. The impulse for self-care.
Secondary Narcisissm
A pathological state; a magnified, extreme manifestation of the primary narcissism which exists in all individuals.
Sexual Instinct, Eros
Compatible with the self-preservative instincts
Death-instinct, or Thanatos
A natural desire to “re-establish a state of things that was disturbed by the emergence of life” (“Ego and the Id” 709).
Allowed Freud to explain man’s desire for murder and destruction.
Id
The id is the primitive and instinctive component of personality. It consists of all the inherited (i.e. biological) components of personality present at birth, including the sex (life) instinct – Eros (which contains the libido), and the aggressive (death) instinct - Thanatos.
The id is the impulsive (and unconscious) part of our psyche which responds directly and immediately to the instincts.
Superego
The superego incorporates the values and morals of society which are learned from one’s parents and others. It develops around the age of 3 – 5 during the phallic stage of psychosexual development.
The superego’s function is to control the id’s impulses, especially those which society forbids, such as sex and aggression.
