Key Psychological Terms & Counselling Phrases
Archetype: In analytical psychology, an archetype is an inherited mental structure or pattern which forms part of the collective unconscious. Archetypes are only observable through their manifestations in behaviour especially that associated with ancient and universal experiences such as births, marriage, motherhood, and death.
Attachment Theory: Theory devised by psychiatrist John Bowlby, in which it is proposed that a child has an inborn biological need for close contact with its mother (or primary caregiver) during the first 6 months of life. A normal bond develops if the caregiver is responsive to the infants needs. Maternal deprivation during this critical period can have adverse psychological consequences for the child’s development.
Cognitions: A term referring to the mental processes involved in acquiring and processing information including thinking, knowing, judging and problem solving.
Cognitive Dissonance: Proposed by US psychologist Leon Festinger in 1957. Cognitive dissonance is an unpleasant feeling that occurs when we hold inconsistent or conflicting ideas simultaneously, e.g. “I like smoking cigarettes”, and “Smoking cigarettes damages my health”. According to dissonance theory, holding both these views sets up an unpleasant state that people try to reduce by re-interpreting some part of their experiences to make them consistent with the others e.g. “But I only smoke low-tar brands”.
Cognitive Reappraisal: A form of emotion regulation in which an individual changes their emotional response to a situation by altering their appraisal of that situation.
Collective Unconscious: A set of primordial stories and images, hypothesized by Carl Jung to be shared by all of humanity, and which he proposed underlie and shape our perceptions and desires.
Co-morbidity: The tendency for different forms of mental disorder to occur together, in the same individual.
Conscience: The hypothesized set of beliefs and tendencies that produce a desire to act in a moral manner, and a feeling of guilt when one does not act morally.
Conscious Level: Thoughts and feelings of which one is currently aware.
Defence Mechanism: A term used originally in psychoanalysis and later more widely in psychology and psychiatry to refer to a process whereby the ego protects itself against the demands of the id. More generally, it is a pattern of feeling, thought or behaviour arising in response to a perception of psychic danger, enabling a person to avoid conscious awareness of conflicts or anxiety arousing ideas or wishes. (See Denial, Displacement, Dissociation, Projection, Repression, Reaction Formation)
Delusions: False beliefs that are firmly held, often centred around ideas of persecution or grandeur.
Denial: A defence mechanism involving a failure to consciously acknowledge thoughts, feelings, desires or aspects of reality that would be painful or unacceptable.
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorder (DSM): is published by the American Psychiatric Association and provides standard criteria for the classification of mental health disorders. It is used to varying degrees around the world by clinicians, researchers, policy makers, pharmaceutical companies and many more. There have been five revisions since it was first published in 1952. The most recent is the DSM-IV-TR, published in 2000, which is a “text revision” of the DSM-IV.
Diathesis-Stress Model: A conjecture in psychology that many mental health disorders are caused by the interaction of genetic predispositions and precipitating environmental stress.
Displacement: In psychoanalytic theory displacement is a defence mechanism involving redirection of emotional feelings from an object/person felt to be dangerous/unacceptable to an object/person felt to be safe/more acceptable.
Dissociation: A defence mechanism in which one seeks to create a sense of physical or psychological distance from the threatening event, person or stimulus.
Drive: A term used to refer to any internal source of motivation that impels an organism to pursue a goal or to satisfy a need, such as sex, hunger or self-perseveration.
Ego: In psychoanalysis, a set of reactions that try to reconcile the id’s blind pleasure strivings with demands of reality. These lead to the emergence of various skills and capacities that eventually become a system that can look at itself- and “I”.
Emotions: Affective responses which are characterised by loosely linked changes in three domains: behaviour (how we act), subjective experience (how we feel) and physiology (how various systems in our bodies respond).
Free Association: A method use in psychoanalytic therapy in which the patient is to say anything that comes into their mind, no matter how trivial, unrelated or embarrassing.
Habituation: A decline in the tendency to respond to stimuli that have become familiar. While short term habituation dissipates in a matter of minutes, long term habituation may persist for days or weeks.
Hallucinations: A perceptual experience that appears real but does not originate from the stimulation of a sense organ. They can be experienced by a number of senses including visual, auditory, tactile (touch), or gustatory (taste).
Hypnosis: A temporary trancelike state that can be induced in normal persons. During hypnosis various hypnotic or posthypnotic suggestions sometimes produce effects that resemble some of the symptoms of conversion disorder.
Metacognition: Knowledge and beliefs about one’s own cognitive processes.
Moods: Affective responses that are typically longer lasting than emotions, and less likely to have a specific object.
Negative Cognitive Schema: For Aaron Beck, the core cognitive component of depression, consisting of an individual’s automatic negative interpretations concerning themselves, their future, and the world.
Object Relations: A school of psychodynamic thought that emphasises the real (as opposed to fantasized) relations an individual has with others.
Placebo Effect: The medical or psychological benefits of a treatment produced simply because an individual believes the treatment has therapeutic powers.
Positive Psychology: A movement within the field of psychology that seeks to emphasise in its research the factors that make people healthy, happy, able to cope, or well adjusted to their life circumstances.
Preconscious Level: Mental processes that are not currently in focal awareness, but that could easily be brought to awareness.
Primary Attachment Figure: The main person to whom an infant attaches psychologically.
Projection: In psychoanalysis, a defence mechanism in which intolerable feelings, impulses or thoughts are falsely attributed to other people.
Psychopathology: The study of mental disorder or the mental disorder itself.
Rationalization: In psychoanalytic theory, a defence mechanism in which a false but reassuring explanation is contrived to explain behaviour that in reality arises from a repressed wish.
Reaction Formation: In psychoanalysis, a reaction formation is a defence mechanism that characterises an individual doing the polar opposite of something they want to do or are thinking. For example, someone who is really angry with a work colleague, may be exceptionally friendly towards them.
Repressed Memory: In psychoanalytical theory a repressed memory is an anxious memory that has been pushed out of consciousness where it may fester until it is “recovered”.
Repression: In psychoanalytical theory, a defence mechanism in which thoughts, impulses or memories that give rise to anxiety are pushed out of consciousness.
Resistance: In psychoanalysis, a term describing an individual’s failure to free associate. The person may simply refuse to think or remember relevant experiences, or oppose changing their behaviour.
Rorschach Inkblot Technique: A personality assessment that requires the individual to look at a series of inkblots and report everything they see in them.
Schema: A mental representation of some aspect of prior experience, that is structured in such a way to facilitate perception, cognition, inferences or the interpretation of new information.
Secure Base: According to John Bowlby, the relationship for a child in which the child feels safe and protected.
Self-Esteem: The relative balance of positive and negative judgments about oneself.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: A self-fulfilling prophecy is the tendency for our expectations to foster the behaviour that is consistent with our beliefs. For example, a teacher who believes a pupil is far more intelligent than the rest may give extra time and praise to that child resulting in the child attaining high grades, and hence reinforcing the belief that the child is more intelligent.
Social Learning Theory: A theoretical approach to socialisation and personality that is midway between radical behaviourism and cognitive approaches to learning. It stresses learning by observing others who serve as models and who show the child whether a response he already knows should or should not be performed.
Transference: A term used in psychotherapy to describe an unconscious process where the attitudes, feelings and desires of our earliest significant relationships are projected onto the therapist. The individual begins to experience the therapist in the same way as the significant person from their past.
Unconscious: In psychoanalysis, the unconscious level is a part of the mind containing repressed instincts, wishes, ideas, memories, and images that are not accessible to the conscious mind.
Some Further Freudian Terms
Anal Stage: Second stage of Sigmund Freud’s Psychosexual stages of development. Freud proposed this stage occurred between the ages of 2-3 when the child begins to toilet train. According to Freud, the anus becomes the primary erogenous zone and pleasure is derived from controlling bladder and bowel movements. This represents a conflict between the id, ego and superego, whereby the id derives its pleasure from the expulsion of faeces, and the ego and superego seeks to represent the practical and societal pressures to control oneself.
Electra Complex: Psychoanalytic term used to describe a girl’s sexual feelings toward her father, and anger towards her mother. Freud postulated that during psychosexual development a young girl is initially attached to her mother. When she discovers that she does not have a penis, she becomes attached to her father and begins to resent her mother who she blames for her “castration”. Freud therefore believed that the girl then begins to identify with and emulate her mother out of fear of losing her love. Comparable to the Oedipus Complex.
Fixation: In Freud’s theory of personality, the lingering attachment to an earlier stage of pleasure seeking, even after a new stage has been attained.
Oedipus Complex: In psychoanalytic theory, a general term for the cluster of impulses and conflicts hypothesised to occur during the phallic phase, at around age five, In boys, a fantasized form of intense, possessive sexual love is directed at the mother, which is soon followed by hatred for and fear of the father. As the fear mounts, the sexual feelings are pushed underground and the boy identifies with the father. An equivalent process is hypothesised in girls and is called the Electra Complex.
Oral Stage: In psychoanalytic theory, the earliest stage of psychosexual development during which the primary source of bodily pleasure is stimulation of the mouth and lips.
Penis Envy: In psychoanalytic theory, the wish for a penis in females as part of the Electra Complex.
Phallic Stage: In psychoanalytic theory, the stage of psychosexual development during which the child begins to regard his or her own genitals as a major source of gratification.
Pleasure Principle: One of two major principles that Freud held governed psychological life. The pleasure principle is thought to characterise the id, which seeks to reduce tensions generated by biological urges.
Reality Principle: One of two
major principles that Freud held governed psychological life. The reality
principle is thought to characterise the ego, which gains pleasure
pragmatically, by finding strategies that work in the real world.
Superego: In Freud’s theory, the superego is one of the three components of the human mental apparatus. The superego incorporates the values and morals of society. Its primary function is to control the impulses of the id which society may deem inappropriate (particularly sex and aggression).It also persuades the ego to turn to moralistic goals rather than realistic ones, and strives for perfection. The superego consists of two systems; the conscience and the ideal self.
Types of Disorders
Acute Stress Disorder: A reaction sometimes observed in individuals who have experienced a traumatic event, characterised by recurrent nightmares and waking flashbacks. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is one such example.
Affective Disorders: A form of psychopathology in which the predominant disturbances lie in mood and motivation such as depression and bipolar disorder.
Agoraphobia: is an anxiety disorder; the fear of being alone and outside of the home, especially in public places; often observed in those suffering from panic disorder.
Anhedonia: An inability to experience pleasure from once enjoyable activities and interests.
Dissociative Disorders: Disorders in which a whole set of mental events seems to be stored out of ordinary consciousness. These include dissociative amnesia, fugue states, and, very rarely, cases of dissociative identify disorder.
Hysteria: A once-popular name for mental health problems characterised by emotional outbursts, fainting and conversion symptoms such as paralysis. Now viewed as aspects of conversion disorder.
Id: In Freud’s theory, a term for the most primitive reactions of human personality, consisting of blind strivings for immediate biological satisfaction regardless of cost. Governed by the pleasure principle.
Mania: A mood disorder characterised by racing thoughts, pressured speech, irritability or euphoria, and marked impairments in judgment.
Neurosis: A broad term once used for mental disorders whose primary symptoms are anxiety or what seem to be defences against anxiety. Since the adoption of DSM-III, the term has been dropped as a broad diagnostic label, and what were once considered the various subcategories of neurosis (e.g. phobia, anxiety, conversion and dissociative disorders) are now classified as separate disorders.
Psychosis: Loss of
contact with reality, as can occur in severe cases of many kinds of mental
disorders such as mania, major depression, or schizophrenia.
Stress: Psychological and physical tension generated
by physical, emotional, social, economic or occupational circumstances, events
or experiences that are difficult to manage.
For more examples of disorders, see our A-Z Guide of Psychological Conditions.
