Neutrality (psychoanalysis)
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Neutrality (psychoanalysis)
Neutrality is an essential part of the analyst's attitude during treatment,Janet Malcolm, ''Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession'' (1988) developed as part of the non-directive, evenly suspended listening which Freud used to complement the patient's free association in the talking cure.Peter Gay, ''Freud: A Life for our Time'' (1989) Early development In the Little Hans case study of 1909, Freud criticised the boy's father (the prime 'analyst'): "He asks too much and investigates in accord with his own presuppositions instead of letting the little boy express himself". In 1912 he laid down the mirror rule, that the analyst should not reciprocate the patient's confidences, but only reflect back what they themselves contained. In 1915 he introduced the term neutrality, warning especially against too great eagerness to cure; and in 1919 he wrote against offering guidance or counselling – synthesis as opposed to analysis – as to what form the patient's cure should take. Fr ...
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Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy (also psychological therapy, talk therapy, or talking therapy) is the use of psychological methods, particularly when based on regular personal interaction, to help a person change behavior, increase happiness, and overcome problems. Psychotherapy aims to improve an individual's well-being and mental health, to resolve or mitigate troublesome behaviors, beliefs, compulsions, thoughts, or emotions, and to improve relationships and social skills. Numerous types of psychotherapy have been designed either for individual adults, families, or children and adolescents. Certain types of psychotherapy are considered evidence-based for treating some diagnosed mental disorders; other types have been criticized as pseudoscience. There are hundreds of psychotherapy techniques, some being minor variations; others are based on very different conceptions of psychology. Most involve one-to-one sessions, between the client and therapist, but some are conducted with groups, incl ...
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Nina Coltart
Nina Coltart (21 November 1927 – 24 June 1997), a British psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, and essayist, was born in Shortlands, Kent, England. Her father was a medical doctor and her mother, a housewife. In 1940 she and her younger sister Gill were evacuated to Cornwall, where they lived with their maternal grandmother and a nanny who, years before, had cared for Coltart’s mother. Coltart’s parents died in a train wreck under blackout conditions that year on their way to visit their daughters. Coltart attended Sherborne School for Girls and from there went to Somerville College, Oxford, where she read English and Modern Languages. She applied to St. Bartholomew's Hospital's Medical College, where she was the first female editor of the Barts Journal. She earned a medical degree there and began work as a psychiatrist. Soon after Coltart began training in psychoanalysis. In her training analysis she was analyzed by Eva Rosenfeld. Coltart began her private practice in London in ...
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Therapeutic Alliance
A therapeutic alliance, or working alliance, is a partnership between a patient and his or her therapist that allows them to achieve goals through agreed-upon tasks. The concept of therapeutic alliance dates back to Sigmund Freud. Over the course of its evolution, the meaning of the therapeutic alliance has shifted both in form and implication. What started as an analytic construct has become, over the years, a transtheoretical formulation, an integrative variable, and a common factor. Alliance as Analytic In its analytic permutation, Freud suggested the importance of allowing for the patient to be a “collaborator” in the therapeutic process. In his writings on transference, Freud thought of the patient’s feelings towards the therapist as resembling the non-conflicted, trusting elements of early relationships with the patient’s parents, and that this could serve as the basis for collaboration in this way. In later years, ego psychologists popularized a construct t ...
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Intersubjective Psychoanalysis
The term "intersubjectivity" was introduced to psychoanalysis by George Atwood and Robert Stolorow (1984), who consider it a "meta-theory" of psychoanalysis. Intersubjective psychoanalysis suggests that all interactions must be considered contextually; interactions between the patient/analyst or child/parent cannot be seen as separate from each other, but rather must be considered always as mutually influencing each other. This philosophical concept dates back to "German Idealism" and phenomenology. The myth of isolated mind Trends in intersubjective psychoanalysis have accused traditional or classical psychoanalysis of having described psychic phenomena as "the myth of isolated mind" (i.e. coming from within the patient). Psychoanalyst and philosopher Jon Mills, has criticized this accusation as a misinterpretation of Freudian theory. However, the intersubjective approach emphasizes that psychic phenomena are contextual and an interplay between the analyst and analysand.Orange, At ...
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Evenly-suspended Attention
In psychoanalysis, evenly suspended attention is a form of analytical attention that is removed from both theoretical presuppositions and therapeutic goals. By not fixating on any particular part of the analysand's communication and allowing freedom of the unconscious, the analyst can mindfully benefit from the counterpart rule of free association, on the part of the analysand, to analyze their symptomatic patterns and behaviors. It was originally proposed by Sigmund Freud in 1912, in his text "Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psycho-Analysis". Such "hovering" attention, as Freud initially put it in 1909 in the case study of Little Hans, was a technical development of "alert passivity" from the more aggressive listening and interpretation of the 1890s, as he turned away from the practice of hypnosis towards the new framework of psychoanalysis. Later developments Since Theodor Reik and his 1948 study ''Listening with the Third Ear'', more analytic emphasis has been placed on ...
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Countertransference
Countertransference is defined as redirection of a psychotherapist's feelings toward a client – or, more generally, as a therapist's emotional entanglement with a client. Early formulations The phenomenon of countertransference (german: Gegenübertragung) was first defined publicly by Sigmund Freud in 1910 (''The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy'') as being "a result of the patient's influence on he physician'sunconscious feelings"; although Freud had been aware of it privately for some time, writing to Carl Jung for example in 1909 of the need "to dominate 'counter-transference', which is after all a permanent problem for us". Freud stated that since an analyst is a human himself he can easily let his emotions into the client. Because Freud saw the countertransference as a purely personal problem for the analyst, he rarely referred to it publicly, and did so almost invariably in terms of a "warning against any countertransference lying in wait" for the analyst, ...
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Acting In
"Acting in" is a psychological term which has been given various meanings over the years, but which is most generally used in opposition to acting out to cover conflicts which are brought to life inside therapy, as opposed to outside. One commentator, noting the variety of usages, points out that it is often "unclear whether 'in' refers to the internalization ''into'' the personality, to the growth in ''in''sight, or to the acting with''in'' the session". Patients With respect to patients, the term 'acting in' has been used to refer to the process of a client/patient bringing an issue from outside the therapy into the analytic situation, and acting upon it there. The therapist is advised to respond to the issue immediately to prevent further and more disruptive acting in. Hanna Segal distinguished positive acting in from destructive acting in - both being aimed however at affecting the analyst's state of mind, whether to communicate or to confuse. Posture The term was used in 1 ...
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Abstinence (psychoanalysis)
Abstinence or the rule of abstinence is the principle of analytic reticence and/or frustration within a clinical situation. It is a central feature of psychoanalytic theory – relating especially to the handling of the transference in analysis. As Sigmund Freud wrote in 1914:The cure must be carried through in abstinence. I mean by that not physical self-denial alone, nor the denial of every desire....But I want to state the principle that one must permit neediness and yearning to remain as forces favoring work and change. Later formulations The validity of the abstinence principle has been rediscovered and reaffirmed in a variety of subsequent analytic traditions. * Jacques Lacan re-formulated the principle via the concept of 'analytic bridge' – the analyst necessarily playing the part of the unresponding dummy to bring the patient's unconscious motivations out into the open. * Eric Berne saw analytic frustration as a means of avoiding playing a part in the patient's l ...
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Sándor Ferenczi
Sándor Ferenczi (7 July 1873 – 22 May 1933) was a Hungarian psychoanalyst, a key theorist of the psychoanalytic school and a close associate of Sigmund Freud. Biography Born Sándor Fränkel to Baruch Fränkel and Rosa Eibenschütz, both Polish Jews, he later magyarized his surname to Ferenczi. As a result of his psychiatric work, he came to believe that his patients' accounts of sexual abuse as children were truthful, having verified those accounts through other patients in the same family. This was a major reason for his eventual disputes with Sigmund Freud. Prior to this conclusion he was notable as a psychoanalyst for working with the most difficult of patients and for developing a theory of more active intervention than is usual for psychoanalytic practice. During the early 1920s, criticizing Freud's "classical" method of neutral interpretation, Ferenczi collaborated with Otto Rank to create a "here-and-now" psychotherapy that, through Rank's personal influence ...
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Freud
Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies explained as originating in conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst. Freud was born to Galician Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in the Austrian Empire. He qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna. Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a docent in neuropathology and became an affiliated professor in 1902. Freud lived and worked in Vienna, having set up his clinical practice there in 1886. In 1938, Freud left Austria to escape Nazi persecution. He died in exile in the United Kingdom in 1939. In founding psychoanalysis, Freud developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association and discovered transference, establishing its central role in the analytic proces ...
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Rat Man
"Rat Man" was the nickname given by Sigmund Freud to a patient whose "case history" was published as ''Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose'' Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis"(1909). This was the second of six case histories that Freud published and the first in which he claimed that the patient had been cured by psychoanalysis. The nickname derives from the fact that among the patient's many compulsions was an obsession with nightmarish fantasies about rats. To protect the anonymity of patients, psychoanalytic case studies usually withheld or disguised the names of the individuals concerned (Anna O., Little Hans, Wolf Man, Dora, etc.). Recent researchers have decided that the "Rat Man" was in fact a lawyer named Ernst Lanzer (1878–1914)—though many other sources maintain that the man's name was Paul Lorenz. History of the analysis Lanzer first came to Freud in October 1907 complaining of obsessive fears and compulsive impulses. Freud treated his pa ...
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Transference
Transference (german: Übertragung) is a phenomenon within psychotherapy in which the "feelings, attitudes, or desires" a person had about one thing are subconsciously projected onto the here-and-now Other. It usually concerns feelings from a primary relationship during childhood. At times, this transference can be considered inappropriate. Transference was first described by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, who considered it an important part of psychoanalytic treatment. Occurrence It is common for people to transfer feelings about their parents to their partners or children (that is, cross-generational entanglements). Another example of transference would be a person mistrusting somebody who resembles an ex-spouse in manners, voice, or external appearance, or being overly compliant to someone who resembles a childhood friend. In ''The Psychology of the Transference'', Carl Jung states that within the transference dyad both participants typically experience a ...
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