Psychoanalytic Approach

Conceptual Overview

The distinguishing feature of psychoanalysis is the assumption of an unconscious dimension to social and individual life, one in which both ideas and emotions may operate. The unconscious works both as a mental territory in which dangerous and painful ideas and desires are consigned through repression and other defensive mechanisms, and also as a source of resistances to specific ideas and emotions that present threats to mental functioning. Unconscious ideas, desires, and emotions may be of a sexual nature but may also be related to ambition, envy, fear (of death or of failure), and the like. These often reach consciousness in highly distorted or abstruse ways, requiring interpretation. One of the commonest manifestations of the unconscious are fantasies—mental representations that express unconscious wishes and desires as if they were already realized, yet often in a disguised and indirect manner. Fantasies are equally important in understanding the actions of people in and out of organizations—daydreaming consumers, ambitious leaders, bullied employees, budding entrepreneurs, disaffected voters, and so forth are as liable to be guided and driven by their fantasies as by rational considerations of interests, ends, and means.

All people have an unconscious, and everyone represses unpleasant and disturbing thoughts and emotions. Everyone suffers from the consequences of these repressions. Everyone experiences mental conflict, ambivalence, anxiety, and behavioral symptoms that sometimes cannot be tamed or controlled. Some suffer from unusually severe and debilitating versions of these effects. A key task of psychoanalytic interventions is to restore the contents of the unconscious mind by undoing the effect of repressions and other defense mechanisms. This is especially the case if these mechanisms are dysfunctional; if, in other words, the anxiety, inhibition, and pain that they cause outweigh the comfort and protection that they afford. Psychoanalytic interpretation is the process whereby the hidden meanings of actions, desires, and emotions are gradually brought to light by viewing conscious phenomena as the distorted expressions of unconscious ones. This is a difficult and time-consuming process, because the unconscious resists attempts to reveal its content.

Some of the other core theories of psychoanalysis concern the development of sexuality through a number of stages, the theory of transference through which individuals in later life transfer feelings and fantasies onto different people from those toward whom such feelings and fantasies were originally addressed, and the theory of narcissism, according to which all people address some of their sexual interest toward themselves, seeking to make themselves the center of attention and admiration.