Psychoanalytic Criticism Flashcards
(47 cards)
Displacement
Transferring our anger with one person onto another person.
The goal of psychoanalysis
help us resolve our psychological problems, often called disorders or dysfunctions.
Unconscious
Storehouse of those painful experiences and emotions we do not want to know about because we feel we will be overwhelmed by them.
Repression
The expunging from consciousness, of these unhappy psychological events. However, it doesn’t eliminate our painful experiences and emotions.
Is the place where the “birth” of the unconscious happens
The family
Oedipal Conflict
Competition with the parent of the same gender for the attention and affection of the parent of the opposite gender.
Sibling Rivalry
Competition with siblings for the attention and affection of our parents.
Defenses
the processes by which the contents of our unconscious are kept in the unconscious. Repressing the repressed.
Selective perception
hearing and seeing only what we feel we can handle.
Selective memory
modifying our memories so that we don’t feel overwhelmed by them or forgetting painful events entirely.
Denial
believing that the problem doesn’t exists or the unpleasant incident never happened.
Avoidance
staying away from people or situations that are liable to make us anxious by stirring up some unconscious experience or emotion.
Projection
ascribing our fear, problem, or guilty desire to someone else and then condemning him or her for it, in order to deny that we have it ourselves.
Regression
the temporary return to a former psychological state, which is not just imagined but relived.
Active reversal
the acknowledgment and working through of repressed experiences and emotions, because we can alter the effects of a wound only when we relive the wounding experience.
Fear of intimacy
the chronic and overpowering feeling that emotional closeness will seriously hurt or destroy us and that we can remain emotionally safe only by remaining at an emotional distance from others at all times.
Fear of abandonment
the unshakable belief that our friends and loved ones are going to desert us (physical abandonment) or don’t really care about us (emotional abandonment).
Fear of betrayal
the nagging feeling that our friends and loved ones can’t be trusted.
Low Self-Esteem
the belief that we are less worthy than other people and, therefore, don’t deserve attention, love, or any other of life’s rewards.
Insecure or unstable sense of self
the inability to sustain a feeling of personal identity, to sustain a sense of knowing ourselves.
Oedipal Fixation / Complex
a dysfunctional bond with a parent of the opposite sex that we don’t outgrow in adulthood and that doesn’t allow us to develop mature relationships with our peers.
Psychoanalysis therapy
The controlled working in and with anxiety.
Dream displacement
Whenever we use a “safe” person, event, or object as a “stand‑ in” to represent a more threatening person, event, or object.
Condensation:
when we substitute a person or object for several dissimilar persons or objects, which are thus “brought together.”
