Introduction to Psychoanalytical Studies

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is the method of psychological and personality therapy in which free association, dream interpretation, and analysis of resistance and transference are used to explore repressed or unconscious impulses, anxieties, and internal conflicts, in order to free psychic energy for mature love and work.

The basic principles of psychoanalysis include the following:

1. beside the inherited constitution of personality, a person's development is determined by events in early childhood;
2. human behavior, experience, and cognition are largely determined by irrational drives;
3. those drives are largely unconscious;
4. attempts to bring those drives into awareness meet psychological resistance in the form of defence mechanisms;
5. conflicts between conscious and unconscious (repressed) material can result in mental disturbances such as neurosis, neurotic traits, anxiety, depression etc.;
6. the liberation from the effects of the unconscious material is achieved through bringing this material into the conscious mind (via e.g. skilled guidance).

  
Sigmund Freud
The idea of psychoanalysis came into full prominence under Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, where he formulated his own theory of psychoanalysis. Freud had become aware of the existence of mental processes that were not conscious as a result of his neurological consulting job. 









Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan's work featured the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego, identification, and language as subjective perception. His ideas have had a significant impact on critical theory, literal theory, 20th century French philosophy, sociology, feminist theory, film theory and clinical psychoanalysis.




Laura Mulvey
Laura Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist. Mulvey is best known for her essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen. Her article is one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework, influenced by the theories of Freud and Lacan.







Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek  is a Slovene philosopher and cultural critic who has made major contributions to political theory, film theory, and theoretical psychoanalysis, among other disciplines.