Sixteen Psychoanalytic Concepts for Our Time
Psychological defenses operate individually and culturally.
Mental and emotional dysfunction take different forms in different places and times. For example, conversion symptoms—like psychologically induced blindness, paralysis, or “glove anesthesia”—were common in Victorian-era Vienna, but not so much today.
Here’s a small handful of psychoanalytic concepts that seem especially relevant to our own cultural moment:
Splitting: Perceiving others in black-and-white categories; seeing them as one-dimensional, all good or all bad.
Denial: Refusal to acknowledge or accept reality when it doesn’t align with your wishes or preferences.
Omnipotent Control: Seeking to control others’ behavior, speech, and even thoughts; insisting that others should think your thoughts instead of their own.
Devaluation: Denigrating or dismissing certain people or groups; seeing them as having lesser value or importance.
Moral Masochism: Believing your suffering makes you more important or virtuous than others; for example, feeling superior in proportion to your suffering or victimization.
Projection: Being unaware of undesirable and unacceptable feelings and motives in oneself (for example, spite, hate, cruelty, envy) and mistakenly seeing them in others. (Goes hand-in-hand with splitting; see #1.)
Transference: Responding to someone in the present as if they were a figure from your past—for example, hating someone today because they unconsciously remind you of someone who hurt you growing up.
False Self: A false sense of identity created to gain approval or meet expectations of others, in place of exploring and developing an authentic sense of self.
Omnipotence: Believing and insisting you have power over other people or circumstances; insistence that your desires and preferences can and should override reality.
Externalization: Blaming others or circumstances for your own difficulties, instead of acknowledging responsibility for your own conduct and choices, or recognizing your role in shaping events.
Reaction Formation: Hiding underlying feelings and attitudes by expressing their opposite to an exaggerated degree; for example, lavishing approval and praise on a person or group you unconsciously disdain.
Extreme envy: A destructive impulse to attack or destroy what you cannot have or cannot be—as if to say, “if I can’t have it, it must not exist.”
Repetition and Enactment: When something we do not want to know or understand about ourselves gets played out with others over and over; repeating life or relationship patterns without insight or awareness.
External Splitting: Treating others in ways that push them into polarized, opposing camps, for or against you. (Generally accompanies internal splitting; see #1.)
Displacement: Redirecting feelings from one person or situation to a different, safer target; for example, punishing someone who cannot defend themselves instead of someone powerful or needed.
Projective Identification: Projecting unacknowledged feelings or motives onto someone else, then treating them in ways that provoke the very feelings you’ve projected; for example, projecting rage onto someone else, then provoking them until they actually become enraged. (Goes with splitting and projection; see #1 and #6.)
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I think I’m having trouble understanding the difference between external splitting and projective identification
Really interesting list Johnathen - I'm just wondering for envy instead of extreme envy - does it have any positive attributes for when people might feel this emotion? Is there ever a time where envy serves people for good reason?