Self Psychology
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Self Psychology
Self psychology, a modern psychoanalytic theory and its clinical applications, was conceived by Heinz Kohut in Chicago in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and is still developing as a contemporary form of psychoanalytic treatment. In self psychology, the effort is made to understand individuals from within their subjective experience via vicarious introspection, basing interpretations on the understanding of the self as the central agency of the human psyche. Essential to understanding self psychology are the concepts of empathy, selfobject, mirroring, idealising, alter ego/twinship and the tripolar self. Though self psychology also recognizes certain drives, conflicts, and complexes present in Freudian psychodynamic theory, these are understood within a different framework. Self psychology was seen as a major break from traditional psychoanalysis and is considered the beginnings of the relational approach to psychoanalysis. Origins Kohut came to psychoanalysis by way of neurology an ...
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Psychoanalytic Theory
Psychoanalytic theory is the theory of personality organization and the dynamics of personality development that guides psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology. First laid out by Sigmund Freud in the late 19th century, psychoanalytic theory has undergone many refinements since his work. The psychoanalytic theory came to full prominence in the last third of the twentieth century as part of the flow of critical discourse regarding psychological treatments after the 1960s, long after Freud's death in 1939. Freud had ceased his analysis of the brain and his physiological studies and shifted his focus to the study of the mind and the related psychological attributes making up the mind, and on treatment using free association and the phenomena of transference. His study emphasized the recognition of childhood events that could influence the mental functioning of adults. His examination of the genetic and then the developmental aspects gave the psychoanalytic theor ...
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Melanie Klein
Melanie Klein (née Reizes; 30 March 1882 – 22 September 1960) was an Austrian-British author and psychoanalyst known for her work in child analysis. She was the primary figure in the development of object relations theory. Klein suggested that pre-verbal existential anxiety in infancy catalyzed the formation of the unconscious, resulting in the unconscious splitting of the world into good and bad idealizations. In her theory, how the child resolves that split depends on the constitution of the child and the character of nurturing the child experiences; the quality of resolution can inform the presence, absence, and/or type of distresses a person experiences later in life. Life Melanie Klein was born into a Jewish family and spent most of her early life in Vienna. She was the fourth and final child of parents Moriz, a doctor, and Libussa Reizes. Educated at the Gymnasium, Klein planned to study medicine. Her family's loss of wealth caused her to change her plans. At the age ...
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Moustafa Safouan
Moustafa or Moustapha Safouan ( ar, مصطفى صفوان, 17 May 1921–7 November 2020) was an Egyptian psychoanalyst. Life Born in Alexandria, Safouan was the son of a teacher and trade unionist who was imprisoned for several years for his political activity in 1924. After studying philosophy in Alexandria, and unable to gain a place to study at Cambridge University in the aftermath of the war, he went to Paris to study philosophy in 1946. After entering analysis with Marc Schlumberger, he underwent a training analysis with Jacques Lacan in 1949. He attended Lacan's seminars in the early 1950s, though was forced to stay in Egypt for several years after Nasser came to power. Returning to France in 1959, he was sent by the Lacanian Société Française as a training analyst to Strasbourg.Interview of Moustapha Safoua ...
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The Symbolic
The Symbolic (or Symbolic Order of the Borromean knot) is the order in the unconscious that gives rise to subjectivity and bridges intersubjectivity between two subjects; an example is Jacques Lacan's idea of desire as the desire of the Other, maintained by the Symbolic's subjectification of the Other into speech. In the later psychoanalytic theory of Lacan, it is linked by the ''sinthome'' to the Imaginary and the Real. Overview In Lacan's theory, the unconscious is the discourse of the Other and thus belongs to the Symbolic. It is also the realm of the Law that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex, and is determinant of subjectivity. A formative moment in the development of the Symbolic in a subject is the Other giving rise to the ''objet petit (a)utre'', establishing lack, demand and need. However, when it becomes an empty signifier, psychosis, which Freud had failed to tackle in theory, develops from an unstable metonymic sliding of the signified (i.e., foreclosur ...
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The Imaginary (psychoanalysis)
The Imaginary (or Imaginary Order) is one of three terms in the psychoanalytic perspective of Jacques Lacan, along with the Symbolic and the Real. Each of the three terms emerged gradually over time, undergoing an evolution in Lacan's own development of thought. "Of these three terms, the 'imaginary' was the first to appear, well before the Rome Report of 1953…hen thenotion of the 'symbolic' came to the forefront."Sheridan, Alan. 1994. "Translator's Note" in '' The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis'', edited by J. Miller, ''Penguin Psychology Series''. London: Penguin Books. . Indeed, looking back at his intellectual development from the vantage point of the 1970s, Lacan epitomised it as follows: "I began with the Imaginary, I then had to chew on the story of the Symbolic ... and I finished by putting out for you this famous Real."As quoted in Mellard, James M. 2006. ''Beyond LacanSUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture'' Albany: State University of New York Press ...
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Lacanian
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (, , ; 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, and published papers that were later collected in the book ''Écrits''. His work made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory, as well as on the practice of psychoanalysis itself. Lacan took up and discussed the whole range of Freudian concepts, emphasizing the philosophical dimension of Freud's thought and applying concepts derived from structuralism in linguistics and anthropology to its development in his own work, which he would further augment by employing formulae from predicate logic and topology. Taking this new direction, and introducing controversial innovations in clinical practice, led to expulsion for Lacan and his follow ...
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Object Relations Theory
Object relations theory is a school of thought in psychoanalytic theory centered around theories of stages of ego development. Its concerns include the relation of the psyche to others in childhood and the exploration of relationships between external people, as well as internal images and the relations found in them. Thinkers of the school maintain that the infant's relationship with the mother primarily determines the formation of its personality in adult life. Particularly, attachment is the bedrock of the development of the self or the psychic organization that creates the sense of identity. Theory While its groundwork derives from theories of development of the ego in Freudian psychodynamics, object relations theory does not place emphasis on the role of biological drives in the formation of personality in adulthood. Thinkers of the school instead suggest that the way people relate to others and situations in their adult lives is shaped by family experiences during inf ...
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Drive Theory
In psychology, a drive theory, theory of drives or drive doctrine is a theory that attempts to analyze, classify or define the psychological drives. A drive is an instinctual need that has the power of driving the behavior of an individual; an "excitatory state produced by a homeostatic disturbance". Drive theory is based on the principle that organisms are born with certain psychological needs and that a negative state of tension is created when these needs are not satisfied. When a need is satisfied, drive is reduced and the organism returns to a state of homeostasis and relaxation. According to the theory, drive tends to increase over time and operates on a feedback control system, much like a thermostat. In 1943 two psychologists, Clark Hull and Kenneth Spence, had the first interest in this idea of motivation. They knew it was a sense of their motivation, drives, and an explanation of all behavior. After years of research, they created the drive theory. In a study conducted ...
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The Culture Of Narcissism
''The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations'' is a 1979 book by the cultural historian Christopher Lasch, in which the author explores the roots and ramifications of what he perceives as the normalizing of pathological narcissism in 20th-century American culture using psychological, cultural, artistic and historical synthesis.''The Culture of Narcissism'' at Barnes & Noble
provides the specific dates January 28 (first) and September 21 (mass-market paperback). Retrieved 2012-03-09.
For the mass-market edition published in September of the same year, Lasch won the 1980 US

Jacob Arlow
Jacob A. Arlow (1912–2004) was an American teacher, scholar, and clinician who served as president of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Arlow was an editor of the ''Psychoanalytic Quarterly'' from 1972 to 1979; and published several articles on psychoanalysis, as well as writing a history of psychoanalytic history, and co-authoring with Charles Brenner the influential text ''Psychoanalytic Concepts and the Structural Theory''. Fantasy and myth In perhaps his most significant theoretical contribution to psychoanalysis, Arlow explored the role of unconscious fantasy from the point of view of ego psychology, both subsuming its use in Kleinian theory, and providing the building block for Brenner's later development of conflict theory. His earlier article on 'Fantasy Systems in Twins' (1960) was used by Maynard Solomon to illuminate the inner development of Beethoven, Arlow observing that the “bond of complete understanding whic ...
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Mirror Stage
The mirror stage (french: stade du miroir) is a concept in the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. The mirror stage is based on the belief that infants recognize themselves in a mirror (literal) or other symbolic contraption which induces apperception (the turning of oneself into an object that can be viewed by the child from outside themselves) from the age of about six months. Initially, Lacan proposed that the mirror stage was part of an infant's development from 6 to 18 months, as outlined at the Fourteenth International Psychoanalytical Congress at Marienbad in 1936. By the early 1950s, Lacan's concept of the mirror stage had evolved: he no longer considered the mirror stage as a moment in the life of the infant, but as representing a permanent structure of subjectivity, or as the paradigm of " Imaginary order". This evolution in Lacan's thinking becomes clear in his later essay titled "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire". History of development Lac ...
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Primary Narcissism
The concept of excessive selfishness has been recognized throughout history. The term "narcissism" is derived from the Greek mythology of Narcissus, but was only coined at the close of the nineteenth century. Since then, narcissism has become a household word; in analytic literature, given the great preoccupation with the subject, the term is used more than almost any other'. The meaning of narcissism has changed over time. Today narcissism "refers to an interest in or concern with the self along a broad continuum, from healthy to pathological ... including such concepts as self-esteem, self-system, and self-representation, and true or false self". Before Freud Narcissus was a handsome Greek youth who rejected the desperate advances of the nymph Echo. As punishment, he was doomed to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. Unable to consummate his love, Narcissus 'lay gazing enraptured into the pool, hour after hour', and finally pined away, changing into a fl ...
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