Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

Salman Akhtar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429912146
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book provides easy to read, concise, and clinically useful explanations of over 1800 terms and concepts from the field of psychoanalysis. A history of each term is included in its definition and so is the name of its originator. The attempt is made to demonstrate how the meanings of the term under consideration might have changed, with new connotations accruing with the passage of time and with growth of knowledge. Where indicated and possible, the glossary includes diverse perspectives on a given idea and highlights how different analysts have used the same term for different purposes and with different theoretical aims in mind.

A

Abreaction: concept introduced by Sigmund Freud in 1893 to denote the fact that pent-up emotions associated with a trauma can be discharged by talking about it. The release of affect occurred by bringing ‘a particular moment or problem into focus’ (Freud, 1914g, p. 147) and as such formed the cornerstone of Freud’s early cathartic method of treating hysterical conversion symptoms. Over the later course of evolution of psychoanalysis, however, the concept of abreaction lost its centrality to the treatment method. It came to be recognized as secondary to insight derived from interpretation. None the less, Edward Bibring (1954), in his widely-read paper ‘Psychoanalysis and the dynamic psychotherapies’, included abreaction among the five therapeutic tools of psychoanalysis (the other four being ‘suggestion’, ‘manipulation’, ‘clarification’, and ‘interpretation?’; separate entries on each of them are to be found in this dictionary). Bibring regarded abreaction, or ‘emotional reliving’, as offering evidence and establishing credibility of the actuality of repressed material to the patient. Vamik Volkan (1976) agreed with this, but added that abreaction in the ‘classical’ sense also occurs in treatment. He noted that abreaction differs from ‘emotional flooding’ (see separate entry) in so far as some secondary process functioning and observing ego is retained in the former. As a result, during an abreaction, the patient can make connections between his emotional and ideational fields of experience while he cannot do so during emotional flooding.

Abstinence: it was in the course of elucidating ‘transference love’ and what might be appropriate therapeutic stance in regard to such ‘love’ that Sigmund Freud (1915a) sternly declared that ‘the treatment must be carried out in abstinence’ (p. 165). By this, he meant that the analyst must not gratify the patient’s demands for overt or covert erotic indulgences. To do so would appease the neurotic suffering by substitute pleasures and thwart its deeper resolution by the means of interpretation. While initially restricted to libidinal pressures in transference, the ‘rule of abstinence’ applies to negative transferences also. The analyst must not be tempted to disprove that he or she is not as ‘bad’ as the patient thinks. All in all, the principle of abstinence requires that we neither attempt to modify the transference by indulging the patient nor by changing our behaviour or by insisting upon our own view of who we actually are. Four more things need to emphasized regarding the ‘rule of abstinence’: (1) abstinence must not be equated with remaining silent in response to the patient’s overtures; Herbert Schlesinger (2003, pp. 152-154) has cogently advocated this point, noting that the analyst’s silence can, at time, be felt as an action—even a hostile action—by the patient; (2) abstinence affects both the analysand and the analyst; the former has to tolerate the deprivation and the latter has to sit on his or her impulses to gratify the patient; (3) abstinence can co-exist with occasional and gentle encouraging remarks that support the patient’s analytic ego; and (4) abstinence, in its remote derivatives triggered by events in the intersubjective matrix of analysis, might also involve not eating, drinking, or smoking (cigars!) during the sessions by both parties.

Accident proneness: the failure in the function of self-preservation leading to frequent accidents generally results from a complex interplay of factors. These include: (1) expressing mental conflicts in bodily terms; (2) counterphobic adventures to deny castration anxiety; (3) turning aggression against the self; (4) dramatizing sexual fantasies, especially during adolescence. Liselotte Frankl (1963), who identified these factors, distinguished age-specific accidents from those accidents that reflect a more permanent character disturbance. She suggested that early treatment of children and adolescents and freeing some of the aggression which had been turned against the self can diminish the frequency of accidents and also lessen the incidence of later neurotic developments. See also Theodore Dorpat’s (1978) paper, which concludes that ‘psychic factors play a part in some, but not all, accidents’ (p. 282).

Accidental encounter with patients: see ‘Extraanalytic contacts’.

Accordion phenomenon: this phenomenon is observed during psychoanalytically orientated unofficial diplomacy and was first described by Vamik Volkan (1987). As the dialogue takes place between ‘enemy’ groups with the help of psychoanalytically orientated facilitators, the participants suddenly experience a rapprochement. This Closeness is followed by a withdrawal from one another and then by closeness all over again. Volkan likens this to the playing of an accordion—squeezing together and then pulling apart. Derivatives of aggression within the participants, even when they are hidden, and attempts to protect large-group identities are the underlying basis for this behaviour. Volkan (2006) believes that effective discussion of real-world issues cannot take place unless one allows such ‘accordion playing’ to continue for a while so that the pendulum-like swing in sentiments can be replaced by more secure feelings about participants’ large-group identities.

Acculturation: the gradual process of adaptation to post-migration changes in the topographical, political, historical, and socio-economic aspects of one’s life. The immigrant becomes more familiar with the conventional ways of behaviour in his new homeland. Altered socio-economic status necessitates psychological shifts and emotional adjustment. Facility with the new language improves and identity undergoes transformation (Akhtar, 1995) to include new avenues of self-expression and altered superego dictates.

Acculturation gap: Sudha Prathikanti’s (1997) term for the difference between older and younger members of an immigrant family in their familiarity and comfort with the culture of the country of adoption. This difference can make communications between the two generations difficult and lead to chronic misunderstandings and conflict between them. A clinical counterpart of this gap becomes evident when an immigrant analyst undertakes the treatment of a fellow immigrant from his or her country of origin. While the two seem to have similar cultural backgrounds, the degree to which the values of their new culture have been assimilated by them might vary, leading to difficulties in communication (Akhtar, 2006).

Act of faith: Wilfred Bion’s (1970) term for the analyst’s intervention that has arisen from a sudden intuition and has, for one shining moment, left all prior experience and knowledge behind. The ‘act of faith’, or ‘F’, does not represent the system ‘K’ (see ‘L, H, and K’) or the register of knowledge. It represents the absolute truth, or what Bion calls the ‘O’ (see separate entry). Bion regards the ‘act of faith’ as representing a scientific state of mind only when it is not filled with supernatural fantasy and is devoid of memory and desire.

Acting in: the term ‘acting in’ was coined by Meyer Zeligs (1957) to distinguish ‘acting out’ within the analytic hours from ‘acting out’ outside the analysis. ‘Acting in’ may be restricted to bodily movements and postural changes on the couch through which unconscious conflicts are manifested, or it may involve more elaborate behaviours which express repressed memories. It might manifest genetic or extra transferential fantasies as well as unconscious transference-based desires (Paniagua, 1998). In either case, something is put into action instead of words. Repeating has replaced remembering in these instances. Viewed this way, ‘acting in’ is a form of resistance. However, when the conflictual material pertains to the preverbal periods of childhood and has not had adequate psychic representation and ‘mentalization’ (Fonagy & Target, 1997), then such behavioural communication might be the only way through which it can find its way to the clinical surface. Here, discerning the communicative value of ‘acting in’ takes technical precedence over its resistance potential. In this context, it is interesting to note that, in a later publication, Zeligs (1960) himself regarded ‘acting in’ as a mid-point between ‘acting out’ and free-association.

Acting out: this English language psychoanalytic term has been derived from the German agieren, ‘to act’) which Sigmund Freud (1905e) used in describing certain aspects of the case of Dora. Freud said that ‘she acted out an essential part of her recollections and fantasies instead of producing it in the treatment’ (p. 119). Acting out was thus seen as a resistance to remembering and free association. In the later published and now celebrated paper, ‘Remembering, repeating, and working through’ (1914g), Freud extended the meaning of the term by including the possibility that besides serving as a resistance, acting out could also be a way of remembering. Either way, acting out referred to the behavioural discharge rather than verbal recall of repressed mental contents mobilized during the course of analytic treatment. Departures from Freud’s restricted use of the term began to occur fairly soon. These extended the concept of ‘acting out’ to habitual impulsivity emanating from personality pathology and, in fact, all sorts of socially or morally unacceptable behaviour. Thus, sexual deviations, drug addictions, alcoholism, and antisocial behaviour came to be subsumed under ‘acting out’ (Abt & Weissman, 1965). Helene Deutsch (1966) went even further, and declared that ‘we are all actors-out because nobody is free of regressive trends’ (p. 131); even creativity was a form of acting out for her. Lamenting such overextension and in an uncannily prescient statement, Joseph Sandler, Christopher Dare, and Alex Holder (1973) stated that ‘it is perhaps unfortunate that some such term as ‘enactment’ was not used in the literature to distinguish the general tendency to impulsive or irrational action from acting out linked with the treatment’ (p. 100). They could not have guessed that, some twenty years later, their term ‘enactment’ would gain immense popularity in psychoanalytic literature, especially in North America.

Action language: developed as an alternative to the conventional psychoanalytic vocabulary of forces, mechanisms, and structures, Roy Schafer’s (1976) ‘action language’ describes all psychological goings-on in terms of dynamic processes. This entails that one give up nouns (e.g., libido) and adjectives (e.g., strong ego) in referring to psychological phenomena. Instead, one would speak in terms of verb-adverb formulations (e.g., ‘he carries out his cruel acts towards others without consciously registering them’). In relation to psychological activity also, Schafer’s ‘language’ dictates that we speak of someone not as having ‘become friendly’ but as ‘behaving in a more friendly manner than before’. Such conceptual bedrock would eliminate the distinction between motivational forces and resulting actions, since all would be action; preparatory, preliminary, constitutive, and final steps would all be regarded as a part of an action sequence. Although Schafer’s proposal did not gain wide acceptance and, in fact, was rather harshly criticized (Barratt, 1978), it can be seen as an early nudge towards renouncing ‘one person’ psychology in favour of the contemporary relational and intersubjective perspectives.

Active defensive primal repression: see ‘Primal repression’.

Active technique: term associated with certain interventions introduced into psychoanalytic technique by Sandor Ferenczi (1919a, 1921). In the beginning, there were two such measures: (1) injunctions: interventions aimed at converting repressed impulses into manifest actions, and (2) prohibitions: once repressed impulses have been transformed into actions, telling the patient to stop those very actions. The thinking behind these measures was that a certain amount of acting out facilitates the recall of repressed material. In a later work, co-authored with Otto Rank (1924), Ferenczi introduced a third component of the active technique: (3) setting a deadline for termination: the purpose of this is to facilitate the mourning of unachievable instinctual goals. While Ferenczi (1925a) later abandoned the ‘active technique’, echoes of his technical voice continued to reverberate in the clinical chambers of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud’s injunction for phobics to face their feared objects (quoted in Alexander & French, 1946) is but one example of this. Many decades later, Harold Kolansky and Henry Eisner (1974) spoke of ‘spoiling’ of preoedipal developmental arrest in impulse disorders and addictions in order to stir up more analysable intrapsychic conflicts. A similar notion is discernible in the technical stance for the treatment of sexual perversions by Charles Socarides (1988) , of intensely pleasurable hatred by Otto Kernberg (1992), and of pathological optimism by Jacqueline Amati-Mehler and Simona Argentieri (1989), and Salman Akhtar (1996). For the Freud-Ferenczi controversy around the latter’s ‘active technique’ and other therapeutic experimentations, see the contributions of Andre Haynal (1988, 2005), Axel Hoffer (1991, 2006; Hoffer & Hoffer, 1999), and Peter Hoffer (2003, 2008)

Activity: according to Robert Emde (1988), ‘activity’ is the most important among the ‘basic motives of infancy’ (see separate entry) for behaviour and development during infancy. The tendency for ‘activity’ is in-built and brings with it ‘increasing organization and understanding of the world, independent of learning or reinforcement’ (p. 28). The infant’s activity is matched by parenting behaviours which tend to maximize efforts at tasks of increasing complexity. Emde includes three other dimensions of ‘basic motives of infancy’: (1) ‘social fittedness’, (2) ‘affective monitoring’, and (3) ‘self regulation’ (see separate entries on each).

Activity and passivity: words in daily use that are employed in psychoanalysis for three specific purposes: (1) to characterize the aim of an instinctual drive; (2) to characterize the ego’s attitude towards id, superego, and external reality; and (3) to characterize the overall level of arousal and functioning of the mind at any given time. In the first sense, activity and passivity, respectively, refer to the instinctual drive seeking an object for its gratification or rendering the self as an object for gratifying someone else’s corresponding drive. Thus, sadism is active and masochism passive in terms of instinctual aims, and the same is true of voyeurism and exhibitionism, respectively (Freud, 1915c). This motif of activity and passivity is to be found outside of the Freudian id psychology as well. Wilfred Bion’s (1967) motivational vectors of ‘L, H, and K’ (see separate entry) all come in active and passive forms (i.e., the wish to love and be loved, to hate and be hated, and to know and be known). This touches upon the second usage outlined above. In this view, the ego can adopt an active stance towards id (e.g., by expressing instinctual desires in a controlled manner) or superego (e.g., by defying the dictates of one’s conscience). Or, it can adopt a passive attitude towards the other psychic agencies (e.g., by being overwhelmed by instinctual impulses and mindlessly carrying them out, or surrendering to the hard rebukes of the superego by becoming depressed or suicidal). Similarly, the ego can take an active or passive stance towards the demands of external reality. The third usage of active-passive is in terms of the overall level of mental activity. Combination of high (‘active’) and low (‘passive’) levels of mental activities characterizes a balanced life. Too much passivity can lead to inertia, lack of productivity, and psychic death. Too much activity might reflect a manic defence (see separate entry) and be equally unproductive. Quiet states of mature solitude, introspection, and even simply ‘lying fallow’ (see separate entry) help regenerate psychic coherence and authenticity. Robust activity then gives them an expression. Glorification of one or the other pole (active/passive) of mental life is unwarranted and might reflect cultural prejudice. Another instance of bias was the equation of activity with masculinity and passivity with femininity. This obviously incorrect assumption was the result of the phallocentric bias of the early psychoanalytic theory.

Actual neurosis: although the notion of ‘actual neurosis’ was present in Sigmund Freud’s writing as early as 1894, the term itself was not introduced by him until 1898; Freud distinguished ‘actual neurosis’ from ‘psychoneurosis’ on two grounds: (1) the former resulted from disturbance in contemporary sexual life while the latter was caused by psychological trauma in childhood; and (2) the symptoms of ‘actual neurosis’ were due to the physiological reactions and therefore lacked the psychodynamic depth of the problems associated with psychoneurosis. Freud went on to divide ‘actual neurosis’ into two types: ‘neuraesthenia’ (which resulted from sexual excess, especially frequent masturbation), and ‘anxiety neurosis’ (which resulted from diminished frequency or poor quality of sexual discharge). These conditions were not deemed amenable to psychoanalytic treatment by Freud. A corollary of his early toxicologic (as opposed to purely psychological) theory of anxiety, Freud’s concept of ‘actual neurosis’ is now regarded as obsolete. Any symptoms that might result from excess or lack of sexual activity would now be regarded as secondary consequences of the psychological disturbance leading to the disturbed erotic life in the first place (Fink, 1970).

Actualization: an expression that is used in three different ways in psychoanalysis. (1) The first use pertains to the situations when a growing child’s fantasies are suddenly given credence by an event in the external reality. For instance, if an oedipal phase boy meets with an accident and fractures his leg, the castration anxiety he had been struggling with becomes ‘actualized’. Such ‘actualization’ contributes to the propensity for ‘fixation’ (see separate entry). (2) The second use of the term ‘actualization’ is in the context of an individual transforming his wishes and day-dreams into a concrete product (e.g., a statue, a building, a mechanical invention, a painting, or a book) in external reality. (3) Finally, within the clinical situation, ‘actualization’ finds its counterpart in the ‘role-responsiveness’ (Sandler, 1976) of the analyst, whereby the letter momentarily lives out the transference attributes assigned to him or her.

Adaptation: Heinz Hartmann’s (1958) term for the capacity to cope appropriately and advantageously with one’s environment. When the individual alters the environment to meet his needs, the resulting adaptation is called ‘alloplastic’. When, however, the individual modifies himself in response to the environment, the adaptation is called ‘autoplastic’. Extremes of autoplastic adaptation are seen in severely inhibited behaviours as well as chameleon-like adjustment to the demands of external reality. Extremes of alloplastic adaptation are evident in the act of migration, divorce, and, curiously, also in the capacity to invent new things. Mostly, however, the two forms of adaptation exist and are not seen in such extreme forms. This is clearly seen in marriage, an institution that demands both alloplastic and autoplastic adaptations.

Adaptive perspective: see ‘Metapsychology’.

Addiction: while Sandor Rado (1933) hinted that addiction might, to a certain extent, be the cause of psychopathology rather than its result, and Norman Zinberg (1975) asserted that the psychic attributes of addicts are often the result of a chronic social alienation and restricted ego autonomy, most analysts view addiction as a primary psychopathology. Indeed, there is a fair amount of agreement in the psychoanalytic literatur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication Page
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Definitions of Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts
• An Annotated List of Psychoanalytic Glossaries
• References