Sigmund Freud Glossary

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Instructor's addition: This glossary was created as a supplemental course resource and was not part of Dr. C. George Boeree's original text.

Background and Early Influences

Reductionism: Explaining complex behavior by reducing it to simpler underlying processes. Freud was influenced early in his career by attempts to explain psychological processes in biological and neurological terms.
Mesmerism: An early practice associated with Franz Anton Mesmer that helped lead to the later development of hypnosis.
Cocaine: A powerful and highly addictive stimulant that Freud studied and used early in his medical career before its addictive dangers were fully understood.
Catharsis: From a Greek word meaning cleansing or purification. In early psychoanalytic work, catharsis referred to the release of emotional tension through expressing previously repressed feelings and memories.
Hysteria: A historical term used for symptoms such as paralysis, blindness, or other physical problems that could not be adequately explained by physical disease. Some of these conditions would today be classified as conversion disorder or functional neurological symptom disorder.
Celibacy: Abstaining from sexual activity.

Instincts, Drives, and Psychic Energy

Eros: Freud's life instinct, involving forces that promote survival, sexuality, reproduction, attachment, and life-preserving behavior.
Libido: Psychic energy associated especially with the life instincts and sexuality. The word comes from Latin and is associated with desire.
Thanatos: The term commonly used for Freud's death instinct, involving tendencies toward aggression, destruction, and a return to an inorganic state.
Nirvana Principle: The tendency to reduce psychological tension or excitation toward the lowest possible level. Freud associated this idea with the death drive and the movement toward a state free from tension.

The Structure of Personality

Id: The primitive and entirely unconscious portion of personality that contains basic drives and seeks immediate satisfaction.
Primary Process: The id's way of dealing with tension by forming images, wishes, or fantasies of objects that might satisfy a need.
Pleasure Principle: The id's demand for immediate reduction of tension and satisfaction of needs without regard for reality or consequences.
Ego: The part of personality that deals with reality and attempts to balance the demands of the id, the superego, and the external world. Portions of the ego are conscious, preconscious, and unconscious.
Secondary Process: The ego's realistic thinking and problem-solving process used to find appropriate ways of satisfying the wishes and needs arising from the id.
Reality Principle: The ego's willingness to delay gratification until an appropriate and realistic opportunity for satisfying a need can be found.
Superego: The moral component of personality that contains internalized values, rules, standards, and expectations learned largely from parents and society.
Ego Ideal: The part of the superego containing ideals and standards representing what a person believes he or she should strive to become.

Anxiety

Realistic Anxiety: Fear produced by an actual danger or threat in the external world.
Moral Anxiety: Anxiety produced by conflict between one's behavior or impulses and the standards of the superego. It is often experienced as guilt or shame.
Neurotic Anxiety: Fear that the impulses of the id may become uncontrollable and lead the person to do something that results in negative consequences.

Defense Mechanisms

Defense Mechanisms: Unconscious strategies used by the ego to reduce anxiety and protect the person from threatening thoughts, feelings, impulses, or conflicts.
Denial: Refusing to recognize or accept an external reality that is too threatening or painful.
Projection: Attributing one's own unacceptable thoughts, feelings, impulses, or shortcomings to another person.
Rationalization: Creating a reasonable-sounding explanation for behavior or feelings in order to avoid confronting a more threatening or unacceptable motive.
Repression: The unconscious exclusion of painful, threatening, or conflicting thoughts, impulses, or memories from conscious awareness.
Reaction Formation: Replacing an unacceptable impulse or feeling with its opposite, often expressing the opposite attitude strongly.
Regression: Returning to an earlier and usually less mature pattern of behavior when faced with anxiety or stress.
Displacement: Redirecting an impulse or emotion from its original target to a safer or more acceptable substitute target.
Sublimation: Redirecting an unacceptable impulse into a socially acceptable, constructive, or productive activity.
Asceticism: Renouncing or denying pleasurable needs and impulses as a way of controlling them.
Isolation: Separating a threatening thought or memory from the emotion normally associated with it, allowing the person to discuss or remember the event with little apparent feeling.
Undoing: Attempting symbolically to cancel or reverse an unacceptable thought, feeling, or action through another behavior, ritual, or act.

Psychosexual Development

Erogenous Zones: Areas of the body that Freud believed become major sources of pleasure during different stages of psychosexual development.
Fixation: A continuing attachment of psychological energy to a particular psychosexual stage because conflicts at that stage were not adequately resolved.
Oral Stage: The first psychosexual stage, during which the mouth is the primary erogenous zone and activities such as sucking and feeding are major sources of pleasure.
Oral-Passive: A personality pattern Freud's theory associates with oral fixation, characterized by dependency and behaviors involving the mouth such as eating, drinking, or smoking.
Oral-Aggressive: A personality pattern associated with oral fixation that may include biting, gum chewing, argumentativeness, sarcasm, or verbal aggression.
Anal Stage: The psychosexual stage in which pleasure and conflict are centered on bowel control and toilet training.
Anal-Aggressive: A personality pattern traditionally associated with anal-stage conflict and characterized as messy, disorganized, defiant, destructive, or excessively giving.
Anal-Retentive: A personality pattern traditionally associated with anal-stage conflict and characterized as orderly, perfectionistic, controlling, stubborn, or stingy.
Phallic Stage: The psychosexual stage in which Freud believed attention becomes focused on the genitals and conflicts involving identification with the parents become especially important.
Oedipus Conflict: Freud's proposed conflict during the phallic stage in which a boy experiences desire for his mother, rivalry with his father, and eventually resolves the conflict partly through identification with the father.
Castration Anxiety: In Freud's theory, a boy's fear during the phallic stage that he may lose his penis as punishment for his forbidden desires.
Latency Stage: The period between the phallic and genital stages during which Freud believed sexual impulses become relatively quiet while energy is directed toward school, friendships, skills, and other activities.
Genital Stage: Freud's final psychosexual stage, beginning at puberty, in which mature sexual interests develop and psychological energy is increasingly directed toward adult relationships.

Psychoanalytic Therapy

Free Association: A psychoanalytic technique in which the patient says whatever comes to mind without deliberately censoring thoughts. Freud believed hidden conflicts could emerge through this process.
Relaxed Therapeutic Setting: A setting intended to reduce distraction and encourage the patient to speak freely. In classical psychoanalysis, the patient traditionally reclined on a couch while the analyst remained largely outside the patient's direct view.
Resistance: Thoughts or behaviors that interfere with therapy and may indicate that the discussion is approaching threatening or emotionally significant unconscious material.
Parapraxes: Errors in speech, memory, or action that Freud believed could reveal unconscious thoughts or motives. These are commonly called Freudian slips.
Transference: The process in which a patient redirects feelings, expectations, and relationship patterns originally associated with important people in the past onto the therapist.
Insight: Becoming consciously aware of previously unconscious conflicts, emotions, motives, or experiences and understanding how they influence present behavior.

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