Psychoanalysis Case Study

Psychoanalysis is a method that studies the mind in order to treat mental and emotional disorders by revealing and investigating the unconscious mind. Psychoanalysis stems from the understanding that human beings are built for communication. Many people try to understand what motivations people have and why people behave the way they do. Historical, political, and economic explanations provide to the insight of irrationality of everyday life. Psychoanalysis however provides a different insight. Psychoanalysis examines what lies beneath human behavior, teaching us that unconscious thoughts within us are outside of our everyday thoughts. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis believed that people could be cured of their disorders by making
When Freud’s patients came to see him in order to treat an emotional disorder, he would often times have them lay on a couch. He used the couch so that patients could relax and be able to speak freely with little forethought. Freud would then find the unconscious forces lying behind what they said in order to treat their disorder. Freud was the founder of the use of a couch in a psychologists office, which is still widely used today. Psychoanalytic psychologists believe that typical causes of mental disorders root from unresolved conflicts and trauma. Psychoanalytic treatment is based on the idea that people are motivated by unrecognized wishes and desires. Treatment involves bringing the repressed conflict to consciousness so that the patient can learn to deal with it. There are many different ways in which the psychologist can bring the patient's conflict to consciousness including, rorschach ink blots, Freudian slip, and free
There were people who titled themselves as “Freudians” who believed in Freud’s work. By the 1950’s 12 and a half per cent of American medical students chose psychiatry as a profession. This was at an all time high (Menand). Popular magazines of the 1950s titled their works as “ Will the Twentieth Century go down in history as the Freudian Century?” (Menand) and “ Freud and the Twentieth Century” (Menand). Freud had many people that believed in his works but, he had even more who thought he was a poor therapist who made up the theory psychoanalysis .With all the buzz about psychoanalysis many professors wondered how they could get in on the action (Menand). “Although teachers dislike the term "hidden meanings," decoding a subtext or exposing an implicit meaning or ideology is what a lot of academic literary criticism does” (Menand). That being said, many professors tried decoding psychoanalysis to see what it was all about. One professor excited about the possibilities was Frederick Crews (Menand). As he began researching psychoanalysis he emerged as a full-blown critic of Freud. He created a group called the Freud-Bashers which he was the leader of. He wrote, “what researchers were now revealing was that Freud himself was possibly a charlatan—an opportunistic self-dramatizer who deliberately misrepresented the scientific bona