ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis focuses on the dynamics of the unconscious, desires and impulses, structure of personality, psychosexual stages that drive our behaviours and actions, consisting of those thoughts and feelings that are actively kept out of consciousness by the action of defences. Many of the psychoanalytic ideas and methods are used in business and research as well as therapeutic treatments. Freud’s personality and psychic structure theory (1923) id, ego and superego are important as well as dream analysis and interpretation techniques. Free association as an exercise during which the psychoanalyst encourages patient’s to freely share feeling and thoughts without any inhibition. The primary aim of psychoanalysis is to help patients identify the hidden thoughts, behaviours, and desires that are creating problems in their existence by use of interpretation of transference and countertransference. The objective is to help patients understand the issues that have caused deeply rooted problems and a maladaptive perspective on life that may be unconscious thoughts, feelings, desires, and memories. The aim of psychoanalytic interventions is to discharge suppressed emotions and in the process bringing the unconscious to subconscious, then to conscious. Keeping these in mind, I will focus on use of psychoanalytic work with refugees.
