‘Fuck you man, you sit on twitter talking shit about women all day, you think everyone doesn’t get what’s going on?’ –Malcolm Harris
An experiment that Sigmund Freud could never have imagined 100 years ago may help lend scientific support for one of his key theories, and help connect it with current neuroscience. […] new data supporting a causal link between the psychoanalytic concept known as unconscious conflict, and the conscious symptoms experienced by people with anxiety disorders such as phobias.
{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }
Freudian psychoanalysis refers to a specific type of treatment in which the patient verbalizes thoughts, including free associations, fantasies, and dreams, from which the analyst induces the unconscious conflicts causing the patient’s symptoms and character problems, and interprets them for the patient to create insight for resolution of the problems.
The specifics of the analyst’s interventions typically include confronting and clarifying the patient’s pathological defenses, wishes and guilt. Through the analysis of conflicts, including those contributing to resistance and those involving transference onto the analyst of distorted reactions, psychoanalytic treatment can hypothesize how patients unconsciously are their own worst enemies: how unconscious, symbolic reactions that have been stimulated by experience are causing symptoms. Its theories have been criticised on numerous fronts including the view that they constitute pseudo-science, but psychoanalysis still has many practitioners of various schools.
photo { Fan Ho, Approaching Shadow, 1954 }
