Theo

• Psychodynamic perspective

  1. Understanding of the past and its impact on an individual

  2. Explanation of normal and pathological personality development in terms of dynamics of the mind including motivational factors, affects, unconscious mental processes, conflict, and defense mechanisms

  3. Emphasis on childhood experiences and object relations for understanding personality development

  4. Originated from Freud’s psychoanalytic theory but expanded to object relations theory and neuropsychoanalysis
• Psychodynamic approach

  • Focuses on unconscious psychological processes like wishes, fears, etc.
  • Belief that feelings, motivations, and decisions are influenced by past experiences
• Psychoanalysis


  1. Theory of the human mind and a therapeutic practice

  2. Founded by Sigmund Freud between 1885 and 1939

  3. Four major areas of application: as a theory of how the mind works, as a treatment method for psychic problems, as a method of research, and as a way of viewing cultural and social phenomena like literature, art, movies, performances, politics, and groups
• Assumptions of psychoanalysis

  • Primacy of unconsciousness: psychological processes operate outside conscious awareness
  • Importance of early life experiences
  • Psychic causality: thoughts, emotions, desires, and behaviors stem from identifiable biological and psychological processes
  • Uses of psychoanalytic psychotherapy for those facing recurrent psychic problems
• Models of psychoanalysis

  • The topographic model
  • The psychosexual model
  • The structural model
• Classical and Contemporary Freudians

  • Sigmund Freud (1856-1939): Psychic life is activated by the energy of two primal drives, drives represent the body’s demands on the mind, memory traces structure the whole mind
  • Sándor Ferenczi (1873-1933): Importance of considering real childhood traumatization and early mother-child relationship
  • Anna Freud (1895-1982), Heinz Hartmann (1884-1970): Ego psychology, strengthening the ego to increase impulse control, conflict resolution, and capacity to tolerate frustration and painful affect
  • Melanie Klein (1882-1960): Object Relations theory, instincts concerned with objects, impulses occur in an object relations context
• Melanie Klein (1882-1960) – Object Relations theory
• Melanie Klein's Object Relations theory


  • Instincts as intrinsically concerned with objects (relational nature of drives and not innate)
  • Impulses occur in an object relations context and are object oriented
  • The inward-directed death-drive is experienced as an attacking force, eliciting persecutory anxieties and the fear of annihilation, which is located (projected) outside the self and leads to destructive impulses towards the frustrating object (bad breast) followed by the fear of retaliation
  • By contrast, the satisfying object (good breast) is idealized and protectively split off from the bad object
• Donald Winnicott (1896-1971) – Object-Relations Theory
• Donald Winnicott's Object-Relations Theory

  • Infant and the maternal care together form an inseparable, the infant's development of self is intrinsically tied to the biological, emotional, physiological, psychological and social provisions provided by the mother
  • Newborns exist in an unintegrated, comfortably unconnected moments that are pleasant in nature and the environment for creating the framework for connecting these moments are offered by the mother, resulting in identifying objects
  • The holding environment of a good-enough mother will enable the infant’s mind to create representations of self and other
  • Intermediate or potential space between the subjectively conceived internal reality and the objectively perceived external reality that will remain available as an inner space for experiencing life, creating new ideas, images, fantasies and art, and forming the many features of culture
• Winfried Bion (1897-1979) – Thought-Thinking Apparatus
• Winfried Bion's Thought-Thinking Apparatus

  • Thoughts are anterior in origin to the work of thinking (produced by the thought-thinking apparatus)
  • The infant's first sensory or affective data correspond to a state of frustration, the second stage the infant's ability to withstand frustration
  • The experience of frustration leads to the creation of other possibilities (fantasies, symbols, actions) that provide a new means to achieve satisfaction in reality
  • Thought is no longer considered as a "hallucinatory substitute for desire"
• Jacques Lacan (1901-81) – Structuralist theory of psychoanalysis
• Jacques Lacan's Structuralist theory of psychoanalysis


  • The unconscious is structured like a language
  • It uses linguistic means of self-expression, and the unconscious is an orderly network, as complex as the structure of language
  • Three 'orders' (or cognitive dimensions) are central to Lacan's thought: (1) 'the Imaginary', (2) the symbolic and (3) the Real
  • The emphasis on the life- or death-drives, and the theory of narcissism
  • The recognition of the importance of drive theory yielded an emphasis on sexuality, subjectivity, the language of desire and the structural function of the Oedipus Complex
• Heinz Kohut (1913-81) – Self-Psychology
• Heinz Kohut's Self-Psychology


  • Focused on the individual’s sense of self in particular with regard to the development and regulation of narcissism
  • Stressed the necessary role of the care-giving parent (and later the analyst) to empathically mirror the child’s self-states and allow for idealizing alter-ego/twinship-transferences, thereby supporting the child (the later patient) as a selfobject
  • In contrast to traditional psychoanalysis, which focuses on drives (instinctual motivations of sex and aggression), internal conflicts, and fantasies, self psychology thus placed a great deal of emphasis on the vicissitudes of relationships
• Steven Mitchell (1946-2000) – Relational-Conflict-Theory
• Steven Mitchell's Relational-Conflict-Theory

  • Combines real, internalized and imagined interactions with meaningful others
  • Personality derives from and is built of structures reflecting learned interactions
• Classical and Contemporary Freudians

  relational-conflict-theory
• Personality derives from and is built of structures reflecting learned interactions and expectations with the primary care-givers
• Since the individual’s primary motivation is to be in relationships with others, they will tend to recreate and enact these relational patterns throughout life
• Psychoanalysis


  Exploring relational patterns and confronting them with what is spontaneously and authentically co-created in the psychoanalytic setting between analyst and patient
• All human beings go through the same stages of development
• Stresses on the importance of relationships, particularly with family members
• Relationship between parents and children (childhood relationships will become a template for adult relationships)
• Unconscious part of the mind will form the largest and most inaccessible part of the mind, unaware of the thoughts and emotions that happen at the unconscious part of the mind
• However, these thoughts and feelings have an effect on the conscious mind
• The structure of the mind (id, ego, and super ego) are concepts to explain the way the mind works and how behavior is formed
• Id, Ego, and Super-ego


  • Ego: the conscious part of the mind and what is on the surface
  • Superego: mostly semiconscious
  • Id: the unconscious (fears, unacceptable desires, violent motives, irrational wishes, immoral urges, selfish needs, shameful experiences, traumatic experiences)
• The unconscious mind acts as a repository, a ‘cauldron’ of primitive wishes and impulses kept at bay and mediated by the preconscious area
• People use a range of defense mechanisms to avoid knowing their unconscious motives and feelings
• Key Concepts in Freud's Psychoanalysis

  • Repression
  • Dreams as wish-fulfillments
  • Transference
  • The Oedipus complex
  • Id, Ego, and Super-ego
• Freud's Psychotherapy

  1. Hypnosis

  2. Dream analysis/interpretation: dreams as expressions of the unconscious mind

  3. Free association: the emergence of thoughts, feelings, and fantasies when they are uninhibited by restrictions through fear, guilt, and shame

  4. Transference Analysis
• Freud's Psychoanalysis as a method of research

  1. Single Case studies

  2. Free association & Dream analysis

  3. Cathartic method

  4. Observation/couch-method

  5. Self-analysis