GLOSSARY

The words of psychodynamic thinking

One sentence for each term, then where the idea comes from, how it shows up and what it is not.

A

AI therapy disclosure: AI therapy disclosure is the practice, and in some places the legal duty, of telling a person that the system they are talking to is an AI, not a human clinician.
Attachment style: An attachment style is a person's habitual way of seeking closeness and handling separation in close relationships, described in attachment theory as secure, anxious, avoidant or disorganised.

C

Countertransference: Countertransference is the therapist's emotional reaction to a patient, shaped by the therapist's own history and by what the patient evokes, and used or managed as part of the work.

D

Defence mechanisms: Defence mechanisms are unconscious psychological processes that protect a person from anxiety-producing thoughts and feelings, such as repression, projection, denial and displacement.
Denial: Denial is a defence mechanism in which a person refuses to accept a fact that is too uncomfortable to face, insisting it is not true despite strong evidence.
Desire and lack: In Lacanian psychoanalysis, desire is what remains when need is put into words as a demand, and it is bound to a lack that no object finally fills.
Displacement: Displacement is the unconscious redirection of a feeling or impulse from its original target, which feels dangerous or unacceptable, onto a safer substitute; in dreams, it shifts emphasis to trivial elements.
Dream-work: The dream-work is, in Freud's theory, the set of mental operations that turn latent dream-thoughts into the manifest dream: condensation, displacement, means of representation and secondary elaboration.

F

Father-imago: A father-imago is the unconscious inner image of the father, built from early experience and fantasy rather than from the real man, which colours how a person relates to authority and to men.
Free association: Free association is the psychoanalytic method of saying whatever comes to mind, without editing or leaving anything out, so that the links between thoughts can be heard.

H

Human in the loop: Human in the loop means a named person with the right training can watch an AI system's work, understand its limits, and override or stop it; in mental health, that person is a licensed clinician.

I

Imposter phenomenon: The imposter phenomenon is the persistent feeling of being a fraud despite evidence of competence, described by Clance and Imes in 1978; it is not a recognised psychiatric diagnosis.
Intellectualisation: Intellectualisation is a defence mechanism in which a person uses abstract reasoning to avoid an emotional conflict, treating a painful situation as a problem to analyse instead of something to feel.

M

Manifest and latent content: Manifest content is the dream as remembered; latent content is the meaning that, in Freud's theory, interpretation uncovers behind it, mainly a disguised wish.

O

Object relations: Object relations is a family of psychoanalytic theories holding that the mind is built from internalised images of early relationships, called objects, which go on shaping how a person relates to others.
Oedipus complex: The Oedipus complex is Freud's term for a child's desire for one parent and rivalry with the other during early childhood, which he thought shaped conscience, identity and later relationships.

P

Primal scene: The primal scene is, in psychoanalysis, a child's observation, construction or fantasy of parental sexual intercourse, understood as shaping the child's later psychic life.
Projection: Projection is the attribution of one's own thoughts, feelings or traits to another person or group, often used defensively to avoid owning them.
Psychodynamic formulation: A psychodynamic formulation is a short written account, made by a clinician, of a person's central conflicts, how they developed and how they are likely to show up in treatment.

R

Rationalisation: Rationalisation is a defence mechanism in which a person gives a plausible, logical reason for an action or attitude whose real motive is unconscious or too uncomfortable to admit.
Reaction formation: Reaction formation is a defence mechanism in which an unacceptable feeling or impulse is kept out of awareness by exaggerating its opposite.
Repetition compulsion: Repetition compulsion is Freud's term for the tendency to repeat painful or unresolved experiences in action, in relationships and in dreams, instead of remembering them.
Repression: Repression is the unconscious process of keeping anxiety-provoking thoughts, memories or impulses out of awareness, which Freud called the foundation of psychoanalytic theory.
Resistance: Resistance is, in psychoanalysis, a person's effort, usually unconscious, to keep repressed drives, feelings or thoughts from becoming conscious, which shows up as avoidance during therapy.

S

Slip of the tongue (parapraxis): A parapraxis, or Freudian slip, is an error in speech, memory or action that Freud explained as the interference of an unintended, often unconscious, train of thought.
Splitting: Splitting is the defensive habit of seeing people, or oneself, as all good or all bad because the two cannot be held in one view.
Sublimation: Sublimation is a defence mechanism in which socially unacceptable impulses or energies are turned into socially valued activity, such as art, work or inquiry.

T

The big Other: In Lacanian theory the big Other is the symbolic order of language, law and shared meaning that precedes the individual and in which the subject's desire and unconscious take shape.
The death drive: The death drive is Freud's late hypothesis that mental life includes a tendency toward destruction and a return to the inanimate, opposed to the life drive, Eros; it is among his most contested ideas.
The good-enough mother: The good-enough mother is Donald Winnicott's term for a caregiver who is attuned enough to protect an infant from overwhelming distress without being perfect, which he thought helped the child develop.
The id, ego and superego: The id, ego and superego are the three agencies in Freud's structural model of the mind: instinctual drives, the self that mediates with reality, and the internalised conscience.
The mirror stage: The mirror stage is Jacques Lacan's account of how an infant, around 6 to 18 months, first forms an image of itself as a unified whole by identifying with its reflection or with another person.
The pleasure principle: The pleasure principle is Freud's term for the mind's basic tendency to seek pleasure and avoid unpleasure, which the reality principle later tempers by allowing delay.
The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real: The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real are Jacques Lacan's three registers of psychic life: language and law, images and identification, and what escapes both.
The unconscious: The unconscious is the part of mental life that shapes thought, feeling and behaviour without being available to awareness, a core assumption of psychoanalysis and, in another form, of cognitive science.
Therapeutic frame: The therapeutic frame is the set of fixed conditions that surround treatment, such as time, place, fee, confidentiality and roles, which holds the work steady so that what happens inside it can be understood.
Transference: Transference is the unconscious carrying over of feelings, expectations and ways of relating from earlier important relationships onto someone in the present, most often a therapist.

W

Working alliance: The working alliance is the collaborative bond between client and therapist, defined by Bordin as agreement on the goals of treatment, agreement on its tasks, and an affective bond.

For longer answers, read Learn.

If you are in danger, contact local emergency services now — 112 anywhere in the EU. TwentyThird is not an emergency service. How safety works