disturbing thoughts and wishes in the id, ensuring effective functioning and socially acceptable behavior. During sleep the boundaries weaken, and disturbing wishes may slip into the ego from the id. This often causes us to manifest in our dreams. Freud interpreted this concept in his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams. Something very similar to the weakening of boundaries during sleep may happen during ordinary daytime activities when some impulses from the id manage to cross the repression barrier and cause faulty actions such as “slips” of the tongue. This may occur often if psychologically hurtful experiences during childhood have left the repression too weak, distorted the ego, or strengthened the id too much by over-stimulation. Any kind of psychic trauma may lead to the ego becoming an area of conflict between the intruding id, the threatening superego, and the powerful influences emanating from the surrounding environment. Furthermore, the damage done to the basic psychological structures by traumatic experiences leaves those structures weakened and with defective functioning. Such outcomes can cause intense anxiety and depression. In order to keep functioning effectively, the ego attempts to maintain control by achieving some sort of compromise between the contending forces. Lisa could not separate her self from her problems, and therefor fell victim to them. Her life was not focused, but she managed to create clarity in the release of her sexual self.Patients seek psychoanalytic treatment because they suffer from one or more psychological symptoms such as anxiety, depression, sexual inhibitions or manifestations (such as with Lisa’s conflict), obsessive thoughts, compulsive actions, irrational anger, shyness, phobias, low self-esteem, a sense of being unfulfilled, nervous irritability, and many more. Psychoanalysis does not promise a quick cure but holds hope that through better understanding of ...
