Archive for category: Definitions

Much of mental life, both cognitive and emotional, occurs outside of a person’s conscious awareness. Some thoughts may require purposeful attention to bring them to mind. Psychoanalysts are especially interested in the dynamic unconscious, comprised of those thoughts and feelings that are actively kept out of consciousness by the action of defenses. Such thoughts and feelings would arouse anxiety or self-censure if they became conscious. Often organized as fantasies, they continue to exert powerful effects on a person’s behavior, attitudes, and experiences. These fantasies are vestiges of the past that describe wishful relationships of the self to others. The dynamic unconscious cannot be directly apprehended. Psychoanalysts derive their understanding of the dynamic unconscious through observation and inference facilitated by the method of free association and the focus on fantasies, dreams, and the transference.