Psychoanalytic psychotherapy

Intervention
ICD-9-CM	94.31
MeSH	D011572
[]

Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques related to the study of the unconscious mind, which together form a method of treatment for mental-health disorders. The discipline was established in the early 1890s by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud and stemmed partly from the clinical work of Josef Breuer and others.

Freud first used the term psychoanalysis (in French) in 1896. Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), which Freud saw as his "most significant work", appeared in November 1899. Psychoanalysis was later developed in different directions, mostly by students of Freud such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung, and by neo-Freudians such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan. Freud retained the term psychoanalysis for his own school of thought. The basic tenets of psychoanalysis include:

During psychoanalytic sessions, which typically last 50 minutes and ideally take place 4–5 times a week, the patient (the "analysand") may lie on a couch, with the analyst often sitting just behind and out of sight. The patient expresses his or her thoughts, including free associations, fantasies and dreams, from which the analyst infers the unconscious conflicts causing the patient's symptoms and character problems. Through the analysis of these conflicts, which includes interpreting the transference and countertransference (the analyst's feelings for the patient), the analyst confronts the patient's pathological defenses to help the patient gain insight.

Psychoanalysis is a controversial discipline and its validity as a science is contested. Nonetheless, it remains a strong influence within psychiatry, more so in some quarters than others. Psychoanalytic concepts are also widely used outside the therapeutic arena, in areas such as psychoanalytic literary criticism, as well as in the analysis and deconstruction of film, fairy tales and other cultural phenomena.

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