The psychodynamic orientation began with Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. It holds that unconscious processes, inner conflict and early relationships shape experience and behavior. Later psychodynamic schools include ego psychology, object relations and self psychology.
Vocabulary & evolution of terms
- Cathexis: psychic energy invested in a person, idea or object. Freud's German word was Besetzung, and "cathexis" is the Greek-derived English term his translator James Strachey coined in 1922. In ego psychology and ego state theory, it came to describe the energy that activates a mental state.
- Defense: first used by Freud for repression. Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936) widened it into a catalog of defense mechanisms. Later research treats defenses as ranging from immature to mature.
- Transference: first treated as an obstacle in which the patient redirects feelings about earlier figures onto the analyst. It later became a central tool of the therapy, and countertransference (the therapist's reactions) went from something to eliminate to a source of information.
- Ego state: introduced by Paul Federn for organized states of the ego. Eric Berne, who was analyzed by Federn, used it in Transactional Analysis (Parent, Adult, Child), and John and Helen Watkins built ego state therapy around it.
Related pages
Ego State Therapy