Freud proposed that there are two primary motivations: love/sex (the life instinct) and aggression (the death instinct). Three aspects of the mind work to provide a balance between these instincts: the id, ego, and the superego. The id functions according to the pleasure principle and is part of the unconscious mind. He believed people are only born with the id, not the ego or superego. The ego counteracts the id and works to prevent humans from getting in trouble. The superego is the conscience of a person and works according to a morality principle. When the ego defies the id, a great deal of anxiety can occur.

Part of Freud's theory consists of five life stages, primarily focusing on children since childhood is the age about which Freud did the most research. The five stages are: oral(from birth to age 1), anal (2-3), phallic (3-6), latentcy (6-12), and genital (12+) During the oral stage, babies are weaned from breast feeding which can cause separation anxiety if the individual is not ready to give up this mode of consumption. If anxiety occurs, the child is more prone to alcoholism, drugs, eating disorders, and biting his or her nails. The child is potty trained during the anal stage, and the infant is susceptible to developing an anal-retentive or anal-expulsive personality. When a child is forced to defecate when he or she does not want to, the retentive personality is likely to occur, and the person will be obsessive-compulsive. In the phallic stage, boys are attracted to their mothers (Oedipal complex) and gives desire relationships with their fathers (Electra crisis). Boys have a fear of castration and girls experience penis envy, believing their mothers castrated them at an earlier age. Freud did not do as much work with the next two stages. If the child is not appropriately praised or does not feel as though they are adequate, an inferiority complex can develop, often leading to low self-esteem and depression. As the individual enters the genital stage, there is a greater expression of intimacy to the outer world. When a person marries, psychic energy guides him or her to a spouse to get the love not received as a child (i.e. boys marry people like their mothers, girls marry men who parallel their fathers).

Although modern psychologists disagree with many of Freud's theories and believe he dwells too strongly on sexual desires and does not focus enough on other aspects of personality, his work opened the doors to researching the subconsious, the role of childhood in personality.

Some Key Freudian Terms
Compensation: replace one goal for another and feel equally satisfied about the second
Sublimation: during latency, libids energy sublimates for need of achievement
Identification: identifying oneself with something great to make oneself feel better
Intellectualization: isolate feelings from intellect
Reaction formation: act exactly the opposite of how one feels inside
Comprimise formation: you dislike someone a lot so you compliment him/her and as soon as the other person thinks you are being nice, you shoot them down (it tricks superego)
Project: what one does not like in other people is actually what one does not like in oneself
Undoing: try to make up for an action by being nice and lets guilty individual feel better while causes the other person pain
Displacement: take anger out on someone who does not deserve it, often someone more available and will love the individual afterwards anyways
Repression: defense mechanism to forget about or deny an event ever occurred.

Alfred Alder
Karen Horney
Carl Jung
Nancy chodorow
Erich Fromm

What is Psychoanalysis?
As a therapy, psychoanalysis is based on the observation that individuals are often unaware of many of the factors that determine their emotions and behavior. These subconscious factors may create unhappiness, sometimes in the form of recognizable symptoms and at other times in the guise of troubling personality traits, difficulties in work or in love relationships, or disturbances in mood and self-esteem. Because these problems arise from the unconscious, the advice of friends and family, the reading of self-help books, or even the most determined efforts of will, often fail to provide relief. Psychoanalytic treatment demonstrates how unconscious factors affect current relationships and patterns of behavior, traces them back to their historical origins, shows how they have changed and developed over time, and helps the individual to cope with the realities of life.

During analysis the patient becomes aware of the underlying sources of his or her difficulties not simply intellectually, but emotionally by re-experiencing them with the analyst. Typically, the patient goes for counseling four or five times a week, lies on a couch (as ifs stereotypically depicted by the media for all forms of psychology), and attempts to say everything that comes to mind. These conditions create the analytic setting, which permits the emergence of facets of the mind not accessible by other methods of observation. As the patient speaks, hints of the unconscious sources of current difficulties gradually begin to appear; in certain repetitive patterns of behavior, in the subjects which the patient finds hard to talk about, in the ways the patient relates to the analyst.

The analyst helps elucidate these patterns for the patient, who then refines, corrects, and works to improve further thoughts and feelings. During the years that analysis takes place, the patient wrestles with these insights, going over them again and again with the analyst and experiencing them in daily life, in fantasies, and in dreams. Eventually the patient's life (his or her behavior, relationships, sense of self) changes in deep and meaningful ways.

Is Psychoanalysis only a Therapy?
Although psychoanalysis began as a tool for ameliorating emotional suffering, it is not only a therapy. In addition, a method for learning about the mind, and also a theory, a way of understanding the processes of normal everyday mental functioning and the stages of normal development from infancy to old age. Furthermore, since psychoanalysis seeks to explain how the human mind works, it contributes insight into that which the human mind produces. By doing so, Psychoanalysis has had a profound influence on many aspects of twentieth-century culture.

As a general theory of individual human behavior and experience, psychoanalytic ideas enrich and are enriched by the study of the biological and social sciences, group behavior, history, philosophy, art, and literature. As a developmental theory, psychoanalysis contributes to child psychology, education, law, and family studies. Through its examination of the complex relationship between body and mind, psychoanalysis also furthers our understanding of the role of emotions in health as well as in medical illness.

In addition, psychoanalytic knowledge is the basis of all other approaches to therapy. Whatever the modifications, the insights of psychoanalysis form the base of much of the psychotherapy employed in general psychiatric practice, in child psychiatry, and in most other individual, family, and group therapies.

Modern Psychoanalysis
Building on such ideas and ideals, psychoanalysis has continued to grow and develop as a general theory of human mental functioning, while maintaining a profound respect for the uniqueness of every individual life. Ferment, change, and new ideas have enriched the field, and psychoanalytic practice has adapted and expanded. But psychoanalysts today still appreciate the persistent power of the irrational in shaping or limiting human lives, and they therefore remain skeptical of the quick cure, the deceptively easy answer, the trendy or sensationalistic. Like Freud, they believe that psychoanalysis is the strongest and most sophisticated tool for obtaining further knowledge of the mind, and that by using this knowledge for greater self-awareness, patients free themselves from enormous suffering, and improve and deepen human relationships.

Who Can Benefit from Psychoanalysis?
Because analysis is a highly individualized treatment, people who wish to know if they would benefit from it should seek consultation with an experienced psychoanalyst, however, some generalizations can be made. The person best able to undergo psychoanalysis is someone who, no matter how incapacitated at the time, is basically, a sturdy individual. This person may have already achieved important satisfactions - with friends, in marriage, in work, or through special interests and hobbies - but is nonetheless significantly impaired by long-standing symptoms: depression or anxiety, sexual incapacities, or physical symptoms without any demonstrable underlying physical cause.