Teoretické základy psychoanalýzy – Plháková Alena (2025)

The famous British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion compared psychoanalytic knowledge of the human mind to a stripe on a tiger's fur, which we can hardly perceive and truly know as a whole. The author of the monograph Theoretical Foundations of Psychoanalysis attempts to document the efforts of several generations of psychoanalysts to find the 'tiger' - primarily to understand the vast areas of the human unconscious that transcend conscious experience and their influence on behavior and experience. She notes the shift from 'archaeological' searching in the depths of the human psyche to the contemporary emphasis on relationality as the main source of knowledge and therapeutic change, and seeks to capture the multifaceted nature of psychoanalytic theories. In a non-evaluative and knowledgeable manner, she presents insights that free psychoanalysis from various negative connotations often associated with it by both the lay and professional public.

In the first chapters of the book, some key themes from Freud's work are presented, including theories of psychosexual development, narcissism, drives, affects, and perversion. Subsequent chapters are dedicated to defense mechanisms, Freud's significant collaborators, and the main directions of post-Freudian psychoanalysis, which include ego psychology, British and American...