Psychoanalytic Concept
Core concepts used across psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice.
Negative Capability
Negative Capability is a psychoanalytic concept describing the capacity to remain receptive to uncertainty, incomplete meaning, and emotional complexity without forcing a premature explanation. The term originated in John Keats's
Objet petit a
Objet petit a is Jacques Lacan's term for the object-cause of desire: a structural remainder that sets desire in motion without being an object that can finally be possessed. The
Condensation
Condensation is a mechanism of the psychoanalytic dream work through which several ideas, memories, wishes, affects, or persons are represented by a single image or element. A condensed formation is
Psychic Reality
Psychic Reality is a psychoanalytic term for the inner reality formed by wishes, fantasies, memories, affects, and unconscious meanings, whether or not they correspond to events in the external world.
Mirror Stage
Mirror Stage is Jacques Lacan's account of how an infant's encounter with a unified image of the body contributes to the formation of the ego and to the subject's relation
Beta Elements
Beta Elements are Wilfred Bion's term for sensory impressions and emotional experiences that have not yet been transformed into thinkable mental forms. In his theory of thinking, they represent experience
Object Constancy
Object Constancy is a psychoanalytic concept describing the capacity to maintain a stable, emotionally invested representation of another person when that person is absent, disappointing, or experienced through mixed feelings.
Reparation
Reparation is a psychoanalytic concept associated especially with Melanie Klein's account of how a person responds to the recognition of having both loving and destructive impulses toward the same object.
Ambivalence
Ambivalence is a psychoanalytic concept for the coexistence of opposing feelings, wishes, or attitudes toward the same person, object, or situation. It helps describe why attachment can contain love and
Fort-Da
Fort-Da is Freud’s name for a child’s game of sending an object away and back. It links play, absence, and repetition in psychoanalysis. Definition and scope Fort-Da, also written as