1/ Sixteen psychoanalytic concepts for our time (updated)
Splitting: Perceiving others in black-or-white categories; seeing them as one-dimensional, as purely good or purely evil.
Denial: Refusal to acknowledge or accept reality when it does not fit your wishes & preferences.
Splitting: Perceiving others in black-or-white categories; seeing them as one-dimensional, as purely good or purely evil.
Denial: Refusal to acknowledge or accept reality when it does not fit your wishes & preferences.
2/ Omnipotent Control: Seeking to control othersβ behavior, speech, and even thoughts; insisting others should think your thoughts instead of their own.
Devaluation: Denigrating and dismissing certain people and seeing them as having lesser value or importance.
Devaluation: Denigrating and dismissing certain people and seeing them as having lesser value or importance.
3/ Moral Masochism: Believing your suffering makes you more important or virtuous than others; for example, feeling superior to others based on your self-deprivation or self-sacrifice.
4/ Projection: Being unaware of unwanted/unacceptable feelings and motives in yourself (for example, spite, hate, envy) and mistakenly seeing them in other people instead.
5/ Transference: Responding to another person as if they were someone from your past; for example, punishing someone in the present for wrongs someone else did to you when you were growing up.
6/ False Self: A false sense of identity borrowed from others, in place of exploring and developing your own.
Omnipotence: Believing and insisting you have power over people or circumstances you do not have; insistence that your wishes can and should override reality.
Omnipotence: Believing and insisting you have power over people or circumstances you do not have; insistence that your wishes can and should override reality.
7/ Externalization: Blaming other people or circumstances instead of taking responsibility for your own conduct and choices.
8/ Reaction Formation: Masking underlying feelings and attitudes by expressing their opposite to an exaggerated degree (e.g., expressing exaggerated approval and admiration toward someone you secretly look down on).
9/ Extreme Envy: Destructive envy that leads you to want to destroy what you canβt have or canβt be; as if to say: if I canβt have it, then it must not be allowed to exist.
10/ Repetition and Enactment: When something we do not want to know or understand about ourselves gets played out with others over and over.
External Splitting: Treating others in ways that cause them to polarize into opposing camps, for you or against you.
External Splitting: Treating others in ways that cause them to polarize into opposing camps, for you or against you.
11/ Displacement: Shifting feelings from one person or situation to a different, safer one; for example, attacking someone who cannot defend themselves in place of someone who can retaliate.
12/ Projective Identification: Projecting unacknowledged feelings/motives onto someone else, then behaving in ways that provoke the very feelings you have projected.
e.g., projecting rage onto someone else, then treating them so badly that they actually become enraged.
e.g., projecting rage onto someone else, then treating them so badly that they actually become enraged.
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