I am more into psychoanalyzing people as I am a psychiatric medical student who happens to be a Sartrian existentialist. His "Being andNothingness" actually is a book describing his entire framework of his philosophy of life and delves deeply into psychoanalysis. Especially when it comes to temporality and the past and epistemology, and how do you know what you think you know. Through his line of discussion and rationale, BEING came into the world through nothingness, the void even though he avoids the ideaofacreatorfor we are 'beings-for-ourselves' and 'beings-for-others'.

Nothing had to be here before something/Being could be here and not the other way around.

Hence we are 'beings-for-ourselves' and 'beings-in-the-world' and it has a very psychoanalytical approach to explaining reality and our approach, or his opinion of our approach, to our perception and existence in it.

Hopefully this will getsome conversation going =)

-Sweet Wheat

Hi I'm Rachel (aka Windy), I just joined because I am a psychology student and am interested in learning what I can about psychoanalysis so as to see if I think it is the path I will take. I've started a tribe called "Psychology & Counselling Students" so if anyone here is interested, check us out. Thanks for having me on the tribe.
Rachel

Let´s see if we can liven this up a bit. I´ll go next.
1) I´m here (on this tribe, I´m assuming you mean) because I am very much into psychoanalysis, much to the surprise of most of my coleeagues, who mostly believe psychoanalysis is an old, useless theoretical approach. I highly disagree, so I´m hoping to share some thoughts on this tribe, to share and learn.
2) I was born in Argentina and was raised there until I was thirteen. I gre up around psychoanalysis. Buenos Aires is the city woith the highest number of psychoanalysts in the world!
3) I am entering my second year of graduate school for a Clinical PsyD program with a psychodynamic orientation.
4) I have been in psychoanalysis. InArhgentina, about 5 years ago. It was the most enlghtening, amazing experience I have ever had. I learned so much about my self, my personal history, and about psychology in general. I am a strong believer in couch therapy, since having been through that experience I can tell the drastic difference between getting lost in one´s free flow of thought and that of facing another person and thus being more conscious of oneself.
5) Actually, they are interested. My boyfriend, who is in the same program as me, was more inclined towards a behaviorist approach. He has now began to get more involved in the psychoanalytic theory and I notice his interest growing and thus having a more psychoanlytic approach than he did before.

i realized i hadn't posted my answers!

1) I'm here because I want to be able to talk to other folks about their interests/thoughts about psychoanalysis. I can't talk to most of my friends about it because then they realize that I really am a weird psychoanalyzing psychobabbling person.
2) I've always been interested in psychology, but it wasn't until I had experienced being in a psychodynamic psychotherapy that I began to conceptualize life in this way. Then I took a Psychoanalytic Theory course at Cal, realized that I definitely needed to learn more, and went to grad school to study more. I'm in a Ph.D. program in Clinical Psych.
3) Although I consider myself eclectic within psychodynamic theory, I've tended to lean toward object relations. However, these days I'm much more interested in integrating feminist views and psychoanalysis.
4) I've never been in psychoanalysis, but I can see myself doing it somewhere down the line. I think that I'll be in a lot of therapy in my life, and if I decide to pursue becoming an analyst after getting my doctorate, I will definitely have to be in analysis. I have, however, been in a psychodynamically oriented therapy for 8 years.
5) Most people at my school are not as interested in psychoanalysis as I am. It scares them, I think. Or they consider old washed up stuff that's not applicable with certain populations. I think managed care and politics have been very influential in trying to edge out long term psychotherapy. My friends are actually skeptical about psychotherapy in general. But, I'm finding it interesting that all of a sudden a lot of people have come to me for referrals. I think mid-to-late '20's is a common time for people to realize they need/want to go to therapy.

Thanks, Sandstar, for prompting some discussion.
I became interested in psychoanalysis mostly thru surrealism. Andre Breton's original definition of surrealism was oriented around 'expressing the real functioning of thought' by various means. Of course, how one defines 'thought' is also a topic of concern. Surrealism since then (1924) has developed in different ways but there is still a grounding in a subversive use of psychoanalysis. I'm intensely interested in hypnagogic and hypnopompic activity, the relations between conscious, preconscious and unconscious, and the flow of, or restrictions placed upon, libidinal energy. I like the surrealist movement, the situationists, some anarchists & communists for their relevance to the idea of the interior life becoming more blended with the exterior world as part of a revolutionizing process.
Most of my friends don't understand surrealism and think that psychoanalysis is dogmatic, outdated, typecast...
I' ve never undergone analysis but I would like to. I've done a lot of self-exploration but that's not the same.
I have on my bookshelf The Ego and the Id by Freud ((I think that's the title!) I haven't broke into it yet.
Things I've read in the past include some of Interpretation of Dreams, some Freud essays, Civilization and its Discontents, and Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization.
Can anyone here write a little about the relations between unconscious, preconscious, and conscious (also explaining their understanding of Id, Ego, Supergo, cathexis etc)? I would love to hear detailed info from those who know the subject well.
Thanks,
Mems