Abreaction. Discharge of affect that has been "dammed up" by repression, on recalling the repressed memory.

Aetiology. Causal explanation of disease.

Affect. Emotion or feeling, especially considered quantitatively as a motive force for symptoms.

Analysis. Breaking-down of a neurosis into individual symptoms that are separately treated.

Castration complex. Male child's reaction to discovering the anatomical difference between the sexes.

Catharsis. Release of pent-up emotion; the intellectual precursor to "abreaction".

Cathexis. Damming-up of a quantity of affect at a particular physical or psychic location; caused by repression that prevents the affect from being discharged.

Censorship. Prevention of traumatic memories from becoming conscious, except in symbolic form (cf. repression).

Compromise. Release of repressed memory in the form of a symptom (i.e. compromise between complete repression and conscious expression).

Compulsion to repeat. Instinctive compulsion to repeat unpleasant experiences, said to be derived from the "death instinct."

Condensation. Representation of multiple repressed thoughts in a single dream-image.

Conscious. (Cs.) Mind insofar as it is aware of its own states of thought and feeling.

Constancy principle. Theory that the quantity of "nervous excitation" remains constant until discharged. Connected with Freud's notion that psychic energy, like all forms of physical energy, obeys a law of conservation.

Death instinct. Drive opposed to the sexual one, aiming to "restore" organic life to its "earlier" (dead) state; supposed to explain aggressive and destructive desires and behaviors.

Displacement. Dream-distortion that shifts psychic emphasis from its real focus (in latent content) to some other focus (in the manifest content).

Dream-work. The processes that transform the latent content of dreams into their manifest content. (Includes condensation, displacement, pictorial arrangement, secondary revision.)

Ego. Structure of a person's mental processes as a coherent, organized whole that confronts both external reality and internal drives (the id); the collection of characteristic motives, desires, and self-images that constitute a person's identity.

Free association. Method of discovering unconscious memories by tracing uncontrolled chains of association.

Hysteria. Collection of exaggerated nervous symptoms that have no apparent organic basis in the nervous system, e.g. ticks, convulsions, paralysis, general over-reaction.

Id. Unconscious source of sexual drive, controlled by the ego. An "anonymous" force in the sense that it is independent of, and opposed to, the aims of the ego.

Latent content. Unconscious ideas that are the true content of dreams, distorted by the dream-work to form the manifest content.

Libido. Sexual drive, especially considered quantitatively as a form of energy.

Manifest content. Apparent, unanalyzed content of dreams.

Memory-system. (Mnem.) Systems of memory-traces, in Freud's "topography."

Mnemic residues. Residues, revealed in word-assocation, of repressed memories.

Neurasthenia. Collection of physical and mental symptoms including weakness, headache, insomnia, and general "malaise." (No longer a significant diagnostic category.)

Oedipal complex. Infantile sexual desire for the mother, especially as ongoing source of neurosis.

Perceptual system. (Pcpt.) System of external stimulations, in Freud's "topography."

Pictorial arrangement. Dream-distortion that represents some conceptual or emotional connection between elements as a spatial arrangement. (a.k.a. "dramatization")

Pleasure principle. Fundamental drive to seek pleasure and avoid unpleasure (vs. reality principle).

Preconscious. (Pcs.) Part of the mind characterized by unconscious ideas that are capable of becoming conscious, and by selection of what may become conscious.

Primal scene. Childhood observation of sexual act, the memory of which is repressed and leads to neurosis.

Psychoanalysis. Analysis specifically directed at tracing all neurotic symptoms to repressed memories, especially of childhood sexual fantasies, especially by means of dream-analysis and free association.

Reaction formation. Development of feelings of shame, disgust, etc. as mental forces opposing infantile sexual fantasies.

Reality principle. Fundamental limitation of the pleasure principle by the exigencies of the external world.

Repression. Prevention of memories from becoming conscious; the cause of all neurotic symptoms, which unintentionally express the repressed ideas and feelings.

Resistance. Unwillingness to acknowledge, or to follow chains of association leading to, repressed memories; unwillingness to accept psychoanalytic interpretation.

Seduction theory. Explanation of all hysteria by repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse; abandoned in favor of the Oedipal complex and the general theory of infantile sexual drives.

Slip. Verbal mistake whose motive is a repressed memory.

Sublimation. Direction of libidinal energy to a non-sexual (e.g. intellectual or artistic) pursuit.

Suggestion. Influence of physician's expectations on a patient's attitudes and behavior, and, possibly, on the course of the illness.

Super-ego. Ego's notion of an external moral authority, arising from the child's first experience of external forces (usually the father) frustrating instinctive desires.

Topography. Division of the mind into "regions" with different natures and functions, i.e. Cs., Ucs. Pcs., Pcpt., Mnem. Not to be thought of as a genuine anatomical model, but as a way of picturing the functional differences among the various systems.

Transference. Shifting onto the psychoanalyst of emotions whose real basis lies in unconscious memories, especially of parents, resulting in "re-enacting" the repressed memories instead of directly facing them.

Unconscious. (Ucs.) States of thought, feeling, and memory of which the conscious mind is unaware, but that nonetheless are motives for behavior.