Psychodynamic Flashcards
A theory of dream formation introduced by Hobson and McCarley in which the brain constructs a dream by syn random sensorimotor information from the pons with information stored in memory.
Activation-synthesis hypothesis
The individual’s ability to make changes and/or compromises so as to become better suited to his or her external environment.
Adaptation
In the psychoanalytical model of the mind, the effort to understand aspects of behaviors and mental life that serve the purpose of coping with the external world.
Adaptational perspective
An instrument developed by Main to investigate patterns in adult recollections of early childhood experience related to attachment.
Adult Attachment Interview
The complex emotional/physical states—both pleasurable and painful—produced by and in the body as part of its system of evaluating the self in relationship to the environment for the purpose of survival. Commonly called feelings.
Affect(s)
The process by which the mother empathically reads and reflects back to the child his or her feeling states, thereby helping the child gain confidence in managing intense affects and learn to differentiate between self and other, and reality and fantasy. This lays the groundwork for the child’s development of mentalization.
Affect mirroring
The ability to experience affect states without having to ward them off through defense.
Affect tolerance
The wish to subjugate, prevail over, harm, or destroy others, and the expression of such a wish in thought, action, words, or fantasy.
Aggression
In Freud’s topographic model, the source of psychic energy deriving from the organism’s aggressive wishes.
Aggressive drive
In Fonagy’s theory, an inauthentic sense of self that can develop when the mother’s affect mirroring is mistuned, insensitive, or otherwise defective.
Alien self
A defense in which an individual shows concern for the well-being of others in order to avoid painful feelings such as anxiety about her or her own well-being.
Altruism
A defense in which an individual can only achieve gratification of unacceptable wishes vicariously through extreme, selfless devotion to a proxy.
Altruistic surrender
The simultaneous existence of opposite feelings, attitudes, or tendencies toward another person, thing, or situation.
Ambivalence
A personality style characterized by marked orderliness, stubbornness, and obstinacy, thought to be related to the predominant influence of libido arising from the anal erotogenic zone.
Anal character
The second phase of psychosexual development (extending from 18 months to 3 years), during which libido deriving from the anal erotogenic zone dominates the organization of psychic life.
Anal phase
An affect characterized by a painful experience of apprehension and anticipation of danger.
Anxiety
The biologically based bond between infant and caregiver.
Attachment
A component of attachment theory that includes inborn features of behavior in infant and caregivers that ensure the establishment of attachment.
Attachment behavioral system
A view of attachment proposed by Bowlby that includes development, patterns in children and adults, and sequelae over the course of the life cycle.
Attachment theory
Libidinal aims directed toward the child’s own body, as opposed to those directed toward another person.
Autoerotic
Unconscious mentation in cognitive psychology or in cognitive-behavioral therapy.
Automatic thoughts
Inborn capacities of the mind that develop independently from conflict and that include thought, memory, perception, cognition, and motility.
Autonomous ego functions
The caregiving situation within which an infant’s capacities can develop in a predictable and progressive manner.
Average expectable environment
A branch of psychology that seeks to explain human (and animal) activity as a chain of stimulus-response connections, linked together by reinforcement.
Behaviorism
A psychoanalytic diagnosis introduced by Kernberg marked by ego weakness and disturbances in object relations, including poorly integrated self and object representations.
Borderline personality organization
The fear that unacceptable wishes will lead to punishment in the form of loss of or injury to one’s genitals or one’s body.
Castration anxiety
Breuer’s technique of treating patients with hysteria, consisting of hypnosis and the expression of affects associated with sequestered ideas.
Cathartic method
In Freud’s topographic model, an agent of repression whose function is to keep from consciousness mental content judged to be unacceptable.
Censor
In Freud’s topographic model, the system by which wishes are appraised as unacceptable to consciousness and then repressed.
Censorship
An individual’s stable and enduring traits, attitudes, cognitive styles, and moods.
Character
A disturbance in the structure of an individual’s personality in which there are rigidly held patterns of behavior that get the individual in trouble or lead to the defeat of his or her own aims but that cause him or her little subjective distress.
Character disorder
A process that integrates the subjective experiences of two people in a relationship into a single experience.
Co-created experience
A branch of psychology that focuses on the study of how people know things. It posits the existence of stable, autonomous structures or representations operating within an organism that account for its behavior (or output).
Cognitive psychology
Mentation that is not within awareness that mostly includes phenomena related to information processing.
Cognitive unconscious
A set of unconscious associated feelings and ideas that form a network or template in the mind.
Complex
A mental product that reflects the ego’s solution to a problem presented by the competing demands of id, superego, and external reality.
Compromise formation
The view that the human mind is an information processing system, in the sense of a symbol manipulator that follows step-by-step functions to compute input and output.
Computational model of the mind
A mental process by which a single idea is capable of representing many related ideas, linked by private associations.
Condensation
A struggle within the mind between thoughts, feelings, or structures with opposing aims.
Conflict
A theory about how the ego manages the competing aims of id, superego, and external reality by forging compromise.
Conflict theory
A therapeutic intervention that directs attention to aspects of conscious experience that are observable but that are avoided or disavowed.
Confrontation
In Freud’s topographic model, that part of the mind that is accessible to awareness.
Conscious
A mental state characterized by awareness and self-awareness.
Consciousness
In Bion’s theory, caretaking acts, including soothing and verbalizing, that serve to transform the infant’s chaotic experience into something more tolerable.
Container/contained
The symbolic transformation of unacceptable wishes into physical symptoms.
Conversion
The second stage in the development of the self—from 2 to 6 months—in Stern’s theory about how the sense of self develops in interaction with the mother/caregiver.
Core sense of self
In the theory of Alexander and French, therapeutic change that results from the therapist’s specific efforts to be different from the patient’s parents.
Corrective emotional experience
The therapist’s responses to the patient, conscious and unconscious, including responses that are mainly a reaction to the therapist’s own inner life and those that are mainly a reaction to the patient.
Countertransference
Circumstances that trigger anxiety in all human beings, including loss of an important object, loss of an object’s love, castration anxiety, and superego disapproval (or guilt).
Danger situations
An event from the waking life in the day before the dream that appears in the dream as a symbol.
Day residue
Any unconscious psychological maneuver used to avoid the experience of a painful state of mind.
Defense
A specific and well-delineated act of defense, such as repression, reaction formation, or sublimation.
Defense mechanism
An individual’s characteristic mode of defense, a major constituent of character.
Defensive style
A weakness in psychic structure caused by early deprivation.
Deficit
A defense by which an individual repudiates aspects of external reality, thereby diminishing painful feelings. Also called disavowal.
Denial
A fear that one’s own angry feelings may threaten or harm a needed and loved object.
Depressive anxiety
In Klein’s theory, a stage of development marked by attainment of the ability to integrate good and bad aspects of the experience with an object.
Depressive position
Mentation that is not within awareness at any given moment but can easily be brought to awareness if attention is applied to it.
Descriptive unconscious
Distinct developmental sequences of function and behavior, including wishes, fears, self-regulation, morality, self and object representations, and narcissistic strivings.
Developmental lines
An approach to understanding behavior and mental life as part of a meaningful progression from infancy to adulthood.
Developmental point of view
In Mahler’s theory, a subphase of the separation-individuation process in which the infant begins to show interest in the external world.
Differentiation
In self psychology, a type of psychopathology that is characterized by weakness in the self.
Disorder of the self
A process whereby the interest or intensity attached to one idea is redirected onto another associated idea; often used as a defense.
Displacement
A disruption in the continuity of mental experience for the purpose of defense.
Dissociation
A mental event occurring during sleep that consists of a collection of images, ideas, and emotions.
Dream
The process of transforming the latent dream thoughts into the manifest dream.
Dream work
A psychological representation of a motivational force that emerges from the body as a result of an individual’s biological needs.
Drive
A state of continuous interplay of multiple psychological forces or motivations.
Dynamic
Mentation that is actively denied access to consciousness by the force of repression.
Dynamic unconscious
In Freud’s structural model, the executive agency of the mind, responsible for mediating among the demands of the drives (the id), the external world, and the superego.
Ego
Behaviors that are experienced by the individual as incompatible with the dominant view of the self.
Ego dystonic
Specific capacities of the ego employed in the service of self-regulation and/or adaptation, such as cognition, perception, memory, motility, affect, thinking, language, symbolization, reality testing, evaluation, judgment, censorship, impulse control, affect tolerance, defense, and conflict mediation.
Ego function(s)
A repository of standard, values, and images of perfection by which an individual measures him- or herself.
Ego ideal
In Erikson’s theory, the consolidation of a stable sense of oneself as a unique individual in society.
Ego identity