Classic Freudian Psychoanalysis

Personality has three structures, according to Freud, the id, the ego and the superego, and also incorporates a developmental component that proposes that an individual’s personality is formed during childhood and predetermined during the five psychosexual stages of development: oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital. Freudian psychoanalysis focuses on personality theory, developmental theory, anxiety and defense mechanisms, psychotic defense mechanisms, immature defense mechanisms, neurotic defense mechanisms and mature defense mechanisms. Freudian psychotherapists practice long-term, in-depth psychoanalysis in which their patients spend many years in therapy. Improvement in psychoanalysis is attributed to a combination of catharsis, insight, and working through.

Goals

The goal of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is to “alleviate pathological symptoms by making the unconscious conscious and reintegrating previously repressed material into the total personality structure. The goal is to free the individual of repressed pathological symptoms into the conscious mind, affording the individual the ability to have more control over his or her emotional responses and predictability over his or her environment.” Freudian psychoanalysts are skilled in their art, using techniques such as free association, dream analysis, resistance, and transference and counter transference.