revision psychodynamics

Question 1

what are the two kinds of illnesses?

Answer 1

1. natural: belonged to the realm of the physician
2. preternatural which was classified in three categories:
   - circumsessio: an imitation of a natural illness caused by the devil
   - obsession: the effect of sorcery
   - possession: overt diabolical possession

Question 2

who is Father Johann Joseph Gassner?

Answer 2

• country priest
• known for being good at exorcism for healing
• he referred to the name of Jesus as a way of practice

Question 3

how did Gassner go about?

Answer 3

• he referred to the name of Jesus as a way of practice

Question 4

who is Franz Anton Mesmer?

Answer 4

• Mesmer treated patients more effectively than Gasner
• He claimed he could claim a patient with epileptic through animal magnetism
  Mesmer gave demonstrations during which he elicited in patients the appearance and disappearance of various symptoms
• Dissertation on the influence of planets on human diseases
• When he was around people began to develop symptoms

Question 5

what was animal magnetism?

Answer 5

• Magnetic streams in his patient were produced by a fluid accumulated in his own person
• The magnet was an auxiliary means of reinforcing that animal magnetism and giving it a direction

Question 6

what were the 4 basic principles of animal magnetism?

Answer 6

1. A subtle physical fluid fills the universe and forms a connecting medium between mean, the earth, and the heavenly bodies, and also between man and man
2. Disease originates from the unequal distribution of this fluid in the human body: recovery is achieved when the equilibrium is restored
3. With the help of certain techniques, this fluid can be channeled, stored, and conveyed to other persons
4. In this manner, “crises” can be provoked in patients and diseases cured

Question 7

what was the doctrine of animal magnetism?

Answer 7

• He described that he was able to provoke the appearance of symptoms in patients by his physical presence or by his gestures
• He also reported that when he approached a man who was undergoing a blood-letting, the blood began flowing in a different direction
• Every human being possesses a certain amount of animal magnetism
• Physical theories that were supposed to explain the nature and action of animal magnetism
• He was seeking a rational explanation and rejected any kind of mystical theory – weakest part of the doctrine
• Analogies given by the contemporary discoveries in the field of electricity
• He imagined his fluid as having poles, streams, discharges, conductors, isolators, and accumulators
• The crisis was the artificially procured evidence of the disease and the means to its cure
• Crisis were specific: in an asthmatic it would be an attack of asthma and in an epileptic it would be an epileptic fit
• When the patient was repeatedly provoked, these crises became less and less severe

Question 8

what happened from Vienna to Paris for Mesmer?

Answer 8

• He tried to cure Maria-Theresia Paradis who was blind since the age of three and a half
• At first he had initial success but then there was a conflict between him and her family
• In 1778 he left for Paris, he began magnetizing patients in a private residence
• He had more patients than he was able to treat individually, he inaugurated a collective treatment – the baquet

Question 9

the creation of the societe de l’harmonie

Answer 9

• Society that educated students and spread Mesmer’s teaching
• The subscribers were possession of the “secret”
• For a large account of money
• A strange mixture of business enterprise, private school, and masonic lodge

Question 10

What’s left of mesmer’s legacy?

Answer 10

• Closer to the ancient magician than to the 20th century psychotherapist
• His doctrine contained the seeds of several basic tenets of modern psychiatry:
  i) His power lies in himself
  ii) To make healing possible, he must first establish a rapport “tuning in” with his patient
  iii) Healing occurs through crises-manifestations of latent diseases

Question 11

Purysegur and the new magnetism

Answer 11

• Mesmer is no doubt the initiator of magnetism, but not its true founder
• Marquis de Purysegur
• One of his first patients: Victor Race
• Easily magnetized with a peculiar crisis: he fell into a strange kind of sleep in which he seemed to be more awake and aware than in his normal walking state, he spoke aloud, answered questions, and displayed a far brighter mind than in his normal condition, he had no memory of the crisis once it had passes
• It worked for other patients too
• Once they were in that state they were able to diagnose their own diseases
• The “perfect crisis”: appearance of a waking state, elective relationship with the magnetizer whose commands the subject executed, amnesia followed it
• Soon labeled “artificial somnambulism”
• Only much later was Braid to give this condition its present name “hypnosis”

Question 12

Pierre Janet and psychological analysis

Answer 12

• Professor at Lyceum in Le Havre, meanwhile he was volunteering in hospital to study hypnotism. Leonie who could be hypnotized from a distance and had already been magnetized
• Discussed a doctoral thesis about l’automatisme psychologique
• Interested in psychopathology
• When he was young, he had dreamed of building a philosophy that would achieve a reconciliation of science and religion
• Science was born out of man’s urge to conquer the world, which implied understanding first by means of acquiring knowledge, hence the need for an appropriate method based on analysis and synthesis
• Moral philosophy deals with freedom, responsibility, conscience, and justice, also the existence of god and religion
• Sciences: mathematics, natural sciences, moral sciences (psychology and sociology)

Question 13

Psychological automatism

Answer 13

• Lucie had fits of terror with no apparent motivation
• Through automatic writing he found the meaning and cause
• When she was seven two men hiding behind a curtain had made a practical joke which terrified her
• She developed a second personality known as Adrienne in order to relieve the initial episode when she had her fits
• He used a rapport to relieve her symptoms and the second personality eventually disappeared through hypnosis and automatic writing
• Electivity
• Under hypnosis, two different sets of psychological manifestations can be elicited
  1. There are ‘roles’ played by the subject in order to please the hypnotist
  2. Unknown personality ex. Return to childhood
• Leonie: a third hidden personality was a reviviscence after twenty years of an old hypnotic personality that the magnetizers had elicited in Leonie in the past
• Total vs partial automatism

Question 14

Total:

Answer 14

• A process extending to the subject as a whole (mind-body)
• Catalepsy as the most rudimentary from
• There are some consciousness without consciousness of the ego
• No consciousness without some form of motility

Question 15

Artificial somnambulism

Answer 15

• Amnesia upon awakening
• Memory of previous hypnotic states during hypnosis
• Memory of the waking state during hypnotic states

Question 16

Partial:

Answer 16

• A part of the personality is split off from the awareness of the personality and follows and autonomous, subconscious development
• Partial catalepsy, distractions, subconscious development
• While the subject’s attention is kept absorbed with something else, the physician whispers a question to which the subject will answer unaware, suggestions or even hallucination can be promoted

Question 17

Automatic writing

Answer 17

• Practice by the spiritists since 1850
• Placing a pencil in the hand of an individual and keeping his attention elsewhere, one can see him starting to write things of which he is not aware, and elicit in that way large fragments of subconscious material

Question 18

Post-hypnotic suggestion

Answer 18

• According to Janet, subconscious mind which has been brough to the fore during hypnosis and has no receded, persists and will see the punctual execution of orders given by the hypnotist

Question 19

Psychological analysis

Answer 19

• Became identified w Janet’s exploration of subconscious processes
• Discovery of the “subconscious fixed ideas” and their pathogenic role
• Their cause was usually a traumatic or frightening event that had become subconscious and had been replaced by symptoms
• Primary fixed ideas emerged secondary fixed ideas through association or substitution. Sometimes there might even be a whole array of subconscious fixed ideas, each one originating at a given point of the patient’s life
• Subconscious fixed ideas are at the same time cause and effect of mental weakness
• It is not always easy to identify these fixed ideas
• Sometimes the content of the crisis is revealing
• More frequently, hysterical crises are disguised reenactments of the subconscious fixed idea
• Symbolic character of symptoms
• The subconscious fixed idea has to be sought for by objective means of investigation: hypnosis, automatic writing, distraction
• Subconscious fixed ideas are a characteristic feature of hysteria, in contrast to obsessive neuroses where they are conscious
• But also present in severe sleeplessness and muscular spasms
• The interval between two hypnotic sessions could be divided into two periods
  1. Patient felt relieved, happier, and more efficient and did not think much about the hypnotizer
  2. Patient became depressed and felt the need for hypnosis, and constantly thought about the hypnotist
• The feeling towards the hypnotist could be passionate love, superstitious terror, veneration, or jealousy

Question 20

Freud

Answer 20

• Freud did not write in a linear fashion- he changed his view and emphasis on psychoanalysis during his career
• One main goal was trying to build a model (a theory) – creating an approach that had the generalizability of a hard science theory
• He wrote depending on his environment (history and philosophy of the time)
• He started from an energy driven model – interested in how the functioning mind was influenced in terms of quantity of energy that is retained vs quantity of energy that is discharged
• When you sleep your mental energy is recharging (quiet state of constancy)
• An orgasm is a moment in which you discharge
• Freud specifically linked sexual frustration interacted with psychological states

Question 21

The theory of neuroses

Answer 21

The theory of neuroses

• Symptoms that had no organic cause could be divided in:
• Actual neuroses > source was in the present sexual life of the patient, current imbalance in the discharge accumulation process
• Neurasthenia > excessive masturbation
• Anxiety neurosis > excessive frustrated sexual stimulation (coitus interruptus)
• Psychoneuroses > sources were in his past sexual life
• Hysteria: sexual abuse by an adult, passively suffered in childhood.
• Obsessions: the child’s role was more active, that he felt pleasure. Obsessive ideas were merely self-reproach in modified form
• Self-reproach is a wide range of things to punish yourself ex. I will not eat ice cream because I enjoyed licking my mother’s breasts when I was younger (at a late age ex. 4 years old) According to Freud all obsessive thoughts are linked to sexuality
• Sexual experiences can include innocent things like stimulation of the genitals during whipping, hygiene etc. or can be actual instances of coitus-like acts of seduction during childhood
• Hysterical symptoms are related, sometimes clearly, sometimes in symbolic disguise, to a determined psychic trauma. This trauma may have occurred during a state of slight auto-hypnosis, or its painful character caused it to be excluded from consciousness. In both cases it was not followed by sufficient reaction (ex. Cries)
• Under hypnosis the memory of the trauma is vivid however
• Psychotherapy cures the hysterical symptoms by bringing the trauma to consciousness and discharging it through affect, words, or corrective association
• Freud gave the word “defense” the meaning of “forgetting” painful memories or ideas
• Not the trauma itself is pathogenic, but its representation or idea
• Until 1897 Freud held his belief that hysteria stems from a real act of seduction during childhood: gave rise to vehement protests among other clinicians and in the general population
• In 1897 he abandoned the theory and began arguing that the traumatic sexual event doesn’t not have to be real to have a lasting pathological effect: it can be merely imagined, a product of fantasy
• In the psychic economy, Freud argues imagined incidents have the same causational value as real events: the psyche does not distinguish between real and imagined in any evaluative sense

Question 22

The theory of psychoneuroses

Answer 22

• Example of Freud’s time: hysteria
• Characterized by emotional excitability, excessive anxiety, sensory and motor disturbances, or the unconscious stimulation of organic disorder
• Affected women
• He started studying with Charcot (hereditary theory), if you have a sensitive uterus and something in life happens to provoke hysteria symptoms
• Freud believed it was not only a female disease and progressed his ideas

Question 23

process of hysteria

Answer 23

Childhood (early sexual experience) > puberty (trauma, often trivial) > adolescence (chains of memories) > outbreak of hysteria (actual event)

Question 24

Double value of the symptom

Answer 24

• Fulfillment of impulses, expression of feelings

- Defenses from desires, satisfaction with surrogate

Question 25

repression

Answer 25

unconscious and automatic process

• Stable, removed tendencies do not remain inactive and try to act on consciousness, although they are unrecognizable in the symptom without a symbolic interpretation
• Neurotic behaviors are the compromise to satisfy the removed tendencies >incomprehensible to the subject (ex. A man at the age of 35 cannot breastfeed from his mother and may substitute this tendency by smoking a cigarette in order to satisfy the feeling)

Question 26

GIVING UP HYPNOSIS

Answer 26

• Freud abandoned hypnosis in order not to be subject to criticism of suggestion
• The problem with hypnosis-catharsis is that the experimenter accumulates affective value on himself from the patient up to a deification (quasi-erotic attachment)
• Transfert: projection onto experimenter of ancient affective needs which can be positive or negative
• Translation in psychoanalysis can be overcome through the analysis itself (unlike hypnosis)
• Basic rule: while relaxed on a couch “tell me whatever comes to mind no matter how absurd or embarrassing it may seem”
• Resistance: moments of inhibition and other inner difficulties
• Transference: irrational feelings of love or hostility toward the therapist

Question 27

what is analysis

Answer 27

the understanding/interpretation of resistance and transference

Question 28

einfalle method

Answer 28

• The subject is invited to say what comes into his mind for a given symptom:
  = immediate image idea > free associations

Question 29

unconscious

Answer 29

mental processes carried out without awareness, there is also a part of the unconscious that can emerge to consciousness > the preconscious

Question 30

Topical concept:

Answer 30

• Areas of the psychic organism

- Unconscious  repression  preconscious  consciousness

Question 31

Dynamic concept

Answer 31

• Consciousness as an attribute, as a charge that some mental elements gain or lose

Question 32

Economic concept

Answer 32

• Repression prevents “something” from becoming conscious and if you provide more energy this “something” emerges

Question 33

memory of dreams

Answer 33

• There is both oblivion and transformation

- One of the main factors is logical inconsistency

Question 34

The diurnal rests of the dream scene

Answer 34

• Environment, people etc. are those we experienced around the day before the dream
• Hyper-mnestic dreams: very remote situations that we think we have never experienced but that we retrace to be true

Question 35

Dreams and sensory stimuli

Answer 35

• A single stimulus can initiate different dream scenes because a stimulus is not always translated into the same dream element > creative activity