Freud
'For Freud, displacement (a primary process) means the transference of physical intensities...along an "associative path," so that strongly cathected ideas have their charge displaced onto other, less strongly cathected ones. This process is active in the formation of hysterical or obsessional symptoms, in the dream work, in the production of jokes, and in the transference'.
A major 'achievement of the dream-work is displacement....It manifests itself in two ways: in the first, a latent element is replaced not by a component part of itself but by something more remote - that is, by an allusion; and in the second, the psychical accent is shifted from an important element on to another which is unimportant'. Freud considered that 'displacement is the principle means used in the dream-distortion...displacement or shifting of accent - which in conscious thinking we come across only as faulty reasoning or as means for a joke'.
As well as dream-work and jokes, Freud considered that 'it is an inherent characteristic in the psychology of the obsessional neurotic to make the fullest possible use of the mechanism of displacement...especially apt to become displaced on to what is most insignificant and small'.
Subsequently, 'it was above all in the process of refining the analysis of the transference during treatment and its different manifestations — lateral, indirect, and direct transference (Freud, 1915a; Sándor Ferenczi, 1909/1994; Michel Neyraut, 1974) — that the notion of displacement was expanded'.
Read more about this topic: Displacement (psychology)
Famous quotes containing the word freud:
“Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.”
—Sigmund Freud (18561939)
“Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.”
—Sigmund Freud (18561939)
“The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the laymans belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life.”
—Sigmund Freud (18561939)