Psychoanalysis Flashcards
What did it attack?
The ‘cogito’ central to western thought since the 17th century - assurance of the description of the human mind as a unified whole that can achieve whole awareness of itself.
The unconscious
repository of repressed desires, feelings, memories and instinctual drives
The content of your dreams originates from:
- Recent real life events
- Childhood Memories
- Bodily Stimuli
Chapter 5 Interpretation of Dreams (Oedipus)
It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so”
Slips and displacement quote
‘words spoken in the dream are derived from spoken words remembered in the dream-material. The text of the speech is either retained unaltered or expressed with some slight displacement’
Slips in dreams
‘the verbal malformations in dreams greatly resemble those which are familiar in paranoia but which are also present in hysteria and obsessions’
Objects as language
‘The linguistics tricks performed by children who sometimes actually treat words as though they were objects and moreover invent new languages and artificial syntactic forms, are the common source of these things in dreams and psych-neuroses alike’
How is language important to psychoanalysis?
- W/ respect to therapeutic process; free association; dream analysis; transference
- Linked to linguistic phenomena such as parapraxes and jokes
According to Freud the essential difference between modes of thought characterised by primary…
and the secondary thought processes is one of preverbal vs verbal ways of conceptualising the world
The function of speech in Freud
“…the function of speech…brings material in the ego into a firm connection with the residues of visual, but more particularly of auditory, perceptions”
In ‘On Aphasia’ 1891 he distinguishes between….
‘word-presentations’ and ‘thing-presentations’
‘word-presentations’
mental images of words; involve the linking of an idea to a verbal stimulus; secondary; orientated towards reality
Primary
irrational, governed by the id
Secondary
logical, governed by the ego and external reality
‘thing-presentations’
representations of actual objects; primary; pre-verbal / non verbal;
Condensation
one of the means by which the repressed returns in hidden ways; multiple dream-thoughts condense into composite figures or symbols
Displacement
emotions are displaced so that trivial elements seem to cause distress
The Mirror Stage
the moment in which the child forms an identity or Ego as distinct from the id or the imago. Characterized by the recognition of his own image in the mirror.
Recognising his own image in the mirror….
‘an essential stage of the act of intelligence’
Mirror Play exemplifies… quote
‘the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores it, in the universal, its function as subject’
The mirror stage is the moment in which we…
acquire language
For Lacan, the mind is structured…
like a language; identity is expressed through difference
Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies (Object Relation theory)
locates the origins of Nazism in a particular psychological formation that perceived women, communists, and Jews as external equivalents of internal boundary-threatening urges that had to be violently expelled
Jacques Lacan developed a structuralist theory of psychoanalysis…
based on the linguistic theory of Saussure in the 1950s and 60s
