iorated in the individual through the use of defense mechanisms. Various approaches and techniques are used in psychoanalysis to help unearth the unconscious factors responsible for creating anxiety in the individual, but the concepts and ideas of Sigmund Freud remain at the heart of most psychoanalytic approaches. Many of Freud’s theories and terms have become household words, even to those who have never read any of Freud’s work, simply because they have become so influential in the field of psychoanalysis that they have permeated many other fields and aspects of society, “People who have never read a word of his work nonetheless known of things that can be traced, sometimes circuitously, back to Freud: penis envy; castration anxiety; phallic symbols; the ego, id and superego; repression; Oedipus conflict; sexual sublimation. This rich panoply of metaphors for the mental life has become...something very close to common knowledge,” (Gray, 1993: 1).
Freud began his concept of psychoanalysis when he found that early cases of hysteria he worked with showed the symptoms they did because of repressed memories or traumas. These experiences are typically buried in the unconscious. Freud realized there were some thoughts or events so traumatic to the conscious mind that defense mechanisms would be used in order to repress the events. In one of his lectures on a patient with hysteria he outlined this concept of repression and overcoming defense mechanisms as the way to help the patient achieve a higher degree of mental health, for once the subconscious or repressed thought is made conscious the mental stress is ameliorated, “It is on this idea of resistance that I based my theory of the psychic process of hystericals. It had been found that in order to cure the patient it was necessary that this force should be overcome. Now with the mechanism of the cure as a starting point, quite a definite theory could be constructed. ...