Psychoanalysis Psychoanalysis was born from a therapeutic method for certain nerve diseases which Sigmund Freud and his colleague and compatriot Joseph Breuer jointly elaborated around 1890 and which would produce the work Studies on Hysteria (1895). Freud's first concern in the field of human psyche was the study of hysteria, through which he came to the conclusion that hysterical symptoms were caused by repressed internal psychic conflicts. Over the years he would come to the conviction that mental disorders originated …show more content…
The interpretation of dreams is an arduous task in which the therapist must overcome the unconscious "resistance" of the subject, who censures his trauma as a defense against the anxiety that would cause the evocation of it. Another key aspect of psychoanalytic therapy is the analysis of "transference": in the course of treatment, the patient's primitive and infantile desires, attitudes and feelings towards his or her parents or to the most representative figures of their childhood are usually transferred to the therapist or other figures in her current environment (for example, boss or spouse). Their analysis will allow the patient to understand what these feelings, desires and emotions obey, and reinterpret them without causing …show more content…
The study of sexuality (infantile and adult, perverse and normal, in the healthy man and in the neurotic) induced Freud to conceive the sexual impulse as an energy, "libido", which tends to polarize towards an object (of the opposite sex) for the specific purpose of sexual activity. Freud also provided an evolutionary view regarding the formation of personality by establishing a series of stages in sexual development. In each of the stages, the end is always common: the attainment of sexual pleasure, which pacifies the tensions of the libido. The difference between each of them is in the object that provides pleasure. The child receives instinctive gratification from different areas of the body depending on the stage in which he is. Throughout growth, the child's erotic activity focuses on different erogenous