1/ Fifteen psychoanalytic concepts for our time
A thread

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 others’ behavior, speech, and even thoughts; insisting that others should think your thoughts instead of having their own

Devaluation: Denigrating & dismissing certain people & seeing them as having lesser value or importance

3/ Moral masochism: Believing your suffering or self-sacrifice makes you more important or virtuous; for example, feeling superior to others based on your self-deprivation or self-sacrifice.

4/ Projection: Being unaware of unwanted/unacceptable feelings & 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 sense of identity borrowed from other people, in place of exploring and developing your own

Omnipotence: Believing and insisting we have power over people or circumstances that we do not have; insistence that our wishes must override reality

7/ Externalization: Blaming other people or circumstances instead of taking responsibility for your own conduct & 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 disapprove of)

9/ Extreme Envy: Destructive envy that leads you to want to destroy what you can’t have or can’t be; as if to say, if I can’t have it, then no one else can have it either

10/ Repetition & 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

11/ Displacement: Shifting feelings from one person or situation to a different, safer one; for example, attacking someone who cannot defend themselves instead of someone who can retaliate

12/ bonus concept

Projective identification: Projecting unacknowledged feelings/motives onto someone else, then behaving in ways that provoke the very feelings you projected.

E.g., projecting rage onto someone else, then treating them so badly that they actually become enraged

13/ projective identification is a way to mange unacknowledged/unacceptable feeling and motives *by getting someone else to experience them instead.*

Then we seek to control the other person instead of controlling our own unacceptable feelings & motives