Questions to Guide your Thinking about Psychoanalysis

  1. Summarize the theoretical issues organizing psychoanalysis. That is, if psychoanalysis can be seen as a worldview, what values and beliefs characterize it? How is psychoanalysis different from psychodynamic therapies? similar?

  2. What stance is a psychoanalyst likely to take in therapy? How might she relate to a client? What things would she emphasize? de-emphasize? Why?

  3. How might you recognize strong superego functioning as opposed to weak functioning? What might you do to strengthen superego functioning? modify it? What about the id? How might you recognize it? What might you do in the course of therapy to modify it? How might you recognize the ego? modify its functioning?

  4. Freud's (and Erikson's) stages of development can be thought about as issues that we need to tackle at some point of our lives. From this point of view, what is a fixation?

  5. Think about the defense mechanisms. Come up with examples of each. What is the most basic defense mechanism? Why? How would you know that your defense mechanisms were working well? poorly?

  6. Given the goals of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapies, how does a psychoanalytically-oriented therapist work? Why? If one type of intervention was seen as "most basic," which would it be? Why?

  7. Think about the criticisms of psychoanalysis. Which of these are most valid? Why?

    I remember deciding not too long ago that if I could just stop binging and start eating right, my life would be "perfect." If I could just get control over food, I told myself, bulimia would disappear from my mind and my life. How very wrong I was.

    At that point I was dealing with my bulimia in the same way as a doctor who would treat a sick person's sneezes rather than her cold. I was trying to treat the symptom of bulimia (overeating) rather than the disease itself.

    Bulimia does not deal with food or overeating or binging. Food is not the problem. I believe, however, that bulimia does deal with hunger. Each binge is a signal that the bulimic is starving to death and is desperately seeking nourishment. This hunger, however, is one that does not come from physical emptiness but rather arises from an emptiness deep within a person, an emptiness of self. Food is not the problem behind the hunger and food is not the answer.

    I do not deny that I am hungry when my binge voice starts screaming in my ear. I immediately admit that I am terribly hungry. But I then ask myself, "What am I hungry for?" Rarely am I hungry for food. Food is instead a way of feeding emotional hungers that I otherwise do not know how to feed.

    from a journal entry quoted in Nolen-Hoeksema, 1998, p. 371

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