Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute

Some people can be furious with a partner at nine in the morning and still know, without effort, that they love them. Others lose the loving feeling entirely the moment conflict starts, as though the good version of that person has been deleted. The psychoanalytic name for the capacity that separates these two experiences is object constancy, and it is one of the quieter deve...

Sigmund Freud trained as a neurologist before he founded psychoanalysis, and he spent his early career trying to describe the mind in the language of nerve cells. In 1895 he abandoned the attempt, concluding that the science of his day was not ready for it. A century later a generation of researchers picked up the unfinished work, and the field they built is called neuropsych...

A familiar sequence unfolds in psychotherapy. A person arrives in real distress, works productively for a few months, begins to approach something painful, and then announces the problem has resolved. Symptoms gone, mood lifted, treatment no longer necessary. Sometimes this is genuine recovery. Sometimes it is what analysts call a flight into health.

At the Chicago ...

Few psychological patterns are as recognizable, or as painful to live with, as the sudden reversal in which someone admired becomes someone despised. A friend who was wonderful last week is now impossible. A partner who was the answer to everything becomes the source of every problem. In psychoanalytic theory this is called splitting, and it is not a character flaw. It is one...

Freud made his most consequential discovery by accident. His patients kept developing strong feelings about him, feelings that seemed disproportionate to the actual relationship and oddly familiar in their shape. He first regarded this as an obstacle to treatment. Then he realized it was the treatment. Transference, the phenomenon he named, remains the most distinctive contri...