Video:Overview of Psychoanalysis

Transcript:Overview of Psychoanalysis

Hello, I am Dr. Warren Procci, speaking for About.com, on an overview of psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis is a Form of Treatment

The field of psychoanalysis is slightly more than a hundred years old today.  And when people think about psychoanalysis, they generally think about a type of treatment of various types of mental illnesses.

Psychoanalysis is a way in which individuals who have been suffering from difficulties that have been bothering them, usually since childhood, oftentimes as a result of some unpleasant event or events in childhood, oftentimes as a result of various kinds of inhibitions that they have suffered.  And through the psychoanalytic treatment, one is presumed to be helped with some of these difficulties.

Sigmund Freud Introduced Psychoanalysis

This is an in-depth exploration of an individual’s mind, the way his or her mind works, the kinds of things that were important in his or her development in their early years, and how those things contribute to the difficulties that person is having successfully navigating through life.

Psychoanalysis is really broader than that.  When it was introduced and first formulated by Freud, he had the idea of there being three elements of it:  the first was the treatment, the second was psychoanalysis as a theory, and the third was psychoanalysis as a research tool.

Freud saw psychoanalysis as a way of explaining human behavior in a very broad way.  He saw it not just as a way of explaining problematic behavior, not just behavior that leads people to come for treatment in psychoanalysis, but he also saw it as being able to explain normal growth and development and that psychoanalytic principles had a great deal to do with understanding growth in general.

Research Does Not Solely Rely on Psychoanalysis

The idea of psychoanalysis as a research tool is probably the least utilized of those three elements.  Psychoanalytic theory is often a part of many academic departments in universities.  Some universities would have separate departments of psychoanalysis, others would have psychoanalytic scholars being part of other disciplines.  For example: English, Anthropology, Film Studies, History, Religion.  Those would be just a few areas where psychoanalytic ideas would contribute a lot toward that discipline. 

This is Warren Procci and this has been an overview of psychoanalysis for About.com.  Thanks for watching.