Psychoanalytic Criticism

Question 1

Displacement

Answer 1

Transferring our anger with one person onto another person.

Question 2

The goal of psychoanalysis

Answer 2

help us resolve our psychological problems, often called disorders or dysfunctions.

Question 3

Unconscious

Answer 3

Storehouse of those painful experiences and emotions we do not want to know about because we feel we will be overwhelmed by them.

Question 4

Repression

Answer 4

The expunging from consciousness, of these unhappy psychological events. However, it doesn’t eliminate our painful experiences and emotions.

Question 5

Is the place where the “birth” of the unconscious happens

Answer 5

The family

Question 6

Oedipal Conflict

Answer 6

Competition with the parent of the same gender for the attention and affection of the parent of the opposite gender.

Question 7

Sibling Rivalry

Answer 7

Competition with siblings for the attention and affection of our parents.

Question 8

Defenses

Answer 8

the processes by which the contents of our unconscious are kept in the unconscious. Repressing the repressed.

Question 9

Selective perception

Answer 9

hearing and seeing only what we feel we can handle.

Question 10

Selective memory

Answer 10

modifying our memories so that we don’t feel overwhelmed by them or forgetting painful events entirely.

Question 11

Denial

Answer 11

believing that the problem doesn’t exists or the unpleasant incident never happened.

Question 12

Avoidance

Answer 12

staying away from people or situations that are liable to make us anxious by stirring up some unconscious experience or emotion.

Question 13

Projection

Answer 13

ascribing our fear, problem, or guilty desire to someone else and then condemning him or her for it, in order to deny that we have it ourselves.

Question 14

Regression

Answer 14

the temporary return to a former psychological state, which is not just imagined but relived.

Question 15

Active reversal

Answer 15

the acknowledgment and working through of repressed experiences and emotions, because we can alter the effects of a wound only when we relive the wounding experience.

Question 16

Fear of intimacy

Answer 16

the chronic and overpowering feeling that emotional closeness will seriously hurt or destroy us and that we can remain emotionally safe only by remaining at an emotional distance from others at all times.

Question 17

Fear of abandonment

Answer 17

the unshakable belief that our friends and loved ones are going to desert us (physical abandonment) or don’t really care about us (emotional abandonment).

Question 18

Fear of betrayal

Answer 18

the nagging feeling that our friends and loved ones can’t be trusted.

Question 19

Low Self-Esteem

Answer 19

the belief that we are less worthy than other people and, therefore, don’t deserve attention, love, or any other of life’s rewards.

Question 20

Insecure or unstable sense of self

Answer 20

the inability to sustain a feeling of personal identity, to sustain a sense of knowing ourselves.

Question 21

Oedipal Fixation / Complex

Answer 21

a dysfunctional bond with a parent of the opposite sex that we don’t outgrow in adulthood and that doesn’t allow us to develop mature relationships with our peers.

Question 22

Psychoanalysis therapy

Answer 22

The controlled working in and with anxiety.

Question 23

Dream displacement

Answer 23

Whenever we use a “safe” person, event, or object as a “stand‑ in” to represent a more threatening person, event, or object.

Question 24

Condensation:

Answer 24

when we substitute a person or object for several dissimilar persons or objects, which are thus “brought together.”

Question 25

primary revision

Answer 25

displacement and condensation occur

Question 26

secondary revision

Answer 26

We might forget certain parts of the dream or remember those parts somewhat differently from how they actually occurred

Question 27

Trauma

Answer 27

a painful experience that scars us psychologically

Question 28

Mirror Stage

Answer 28

a sense of itself as a whole rather than a formless and fragmented mass.

Question 29

Initiates the Imaginary order

Answer 29

Mirror Stage

Question 30

The Imgainary Order

Answer 30

the world of images. This is not the world of the imagination, but a world of perception. It’s the world that the child experiences through images rather than through words.

Question 31

The Desire of the Mother

Answer 31

the desire of the mother for the child and the child’s desire of the mother. During this period, the child’s feeling of connection with its mother is its first and most important experience.

Question 32

Symbolic Order

Answer 32

a symbolic system of meaning‑making. Our entrance into the Symbolic Order thus involves the experience of separation from others

Question 33

The biggest separation

Answer 33

The separation with the mother

Question 34

objet petit a

Answer 34

We will spend our lives unconsciously pursuing our bonding with the mother

Question 35

Implies a loss

Answer 35

The use of language

Question 36

The creation of the unconscious

Answer 36

our initial repression of our desire for the union with our mother we felt.

Question 37

common processes of language that imply a kind of loss or lack:

Answer 37

Metaphor and metonymy

Question 38

Methaphor

Answer 38

occur in language when one object is used as a stand‑in for another, dissimilar object to which we want to nevertheless compare it.

Question 39

Metonymy

Answer 39

when an object associated with or part of another object is used as a stand‑in for the whole object.

Question 40

Proccess that relates to metaphor

Answer 40

Condensation

Question 41

Proccess that relates to metonymy

Answer 41

Displacement

Question 42

The first rule, according to Lacan

Answer 42

Mother belongs to Father and not to me.

Question 43

Selfhood

Answer 43

Creation of subjectivity

Question 44

The Real

Answer 44

The uninterpretable dimension of existence; it is existence without the filters and buffers of our signifying, or meaning‑making, systems. We experience the Real when we have a moment in which we see through ideology, when we realize that it is ideology—and not some set of timeless values or eternal truths—that has made the world as we know it.

Question 45

Three stages in problematized by Lacan

Answer 45

The imaginary (mirror stage) -> The Symbolic (language/social order) -> The “Real” (we can never know the “real” because it can never be fully represented it is beyond language).

Question 46

Our identity is constructed relationally

Answer 46

by others and the Other

Question 47

Identity

Answer 47

is not something fixed and stable, it is a process that will never lead to completion.