Glossary

Every term this site uses, in one line each, with a link to the page that explains it. Where a term has no page of its own, the link goes to the page where it is discussed. Terms are in alphabetical order; the section each belongs to is in parentheses.

A

Accomplices (Object Relations): The people around us who get drawn into our patterns without meaning to, and so keep confirming them.
Acting out (Defenses): Acting on a feeling without reflection, so that it goes straight into behavior and skips awareness.
Adaptation and resilience (Capacities): Adjusting to unexpected change and coping creatively with uncertainty, loss and adversity.
Affects (Inner Life): The raw feelings beneath everything, how finely a person can name them, and what naming changes.
Affect regulation (Capacities): Feeling, modulating and expressing a wide range of emotions in ways that suit the situation.
Affiliation (Defenses): Bringing a problem to someone else for help, then carrying out the solution oneself.
Agency and purpose (Capacities): A felt sense of authorship over one’s actions and a life story that holds together.
Altruism (Defenses): Meeting one’s own needs by meeting the needs of others, with the underlying feelings allowed.
Anniversary reactions (Inner Life): Distress that returns on the date of a loss, in its season, or at the age a parent was at a turning point.
Anticipation (Defenses): Thinking ahead about a difficulty, feeling some of it in advance, and planning realistic responses.
Anxious–avoidant style (Personality): Wanting social contact and fearing it, organized around the dread of criticism and rejection.
Attachment (Object Relations): Bowlby, Ainsworth and Main on the bond with caregivers and the internal working models it leaves behind.
Attachment styles (Compared To): Secure, anxious, avoidant and disorganized, and how each maps onto the inner scenes it summarizes.
Attention and learning (Capacities): Focusing, planning, shifting between tasks, and learning from experience when circumstances change.
Autistic fantasy (Defenses): Excessive daydreaming as a substitute for relationships, action or problem-solving.

B

Bodily experience (Capacities): Perceptions, feelings and attitudes about one’s body, and the sense of it as one’s own.
Borderline level of organization (Personality): Poorly integrated identity, primitive defenses, and reality testing that is fragile but intact; a level, not a diagnosis.

C

CBT and cognitive distortions (Compared To): Automatic thoughts and core beliefs, next to pathogenic beliefs and the question of why a belief resists evidence.
Core relational themes (Object Relations): Luborsky’s recurring story: what we want from others, how we expect them to respond, and how we respond in turn.
Corrective emotional experience (How It Works): Being treated, by someone who matters, in a way that contradicts the old expectation; one of the engines of change.
Countertransference (Object Relations): The listener’s own reactions, how clinicians use them, and why Geist deliberately does not.

D

Defense (Defenses): An automatic way of protecting oneself from a painful feeling, ranked here by the DMRS hierarchy from most to least adaptive.
Defensive functioning (Capacities): A person’s characteristic ways of managing anxiety, shame, grief and other painful states.
Denial (Defenses): Refusing to acknowledge some painful aspect of reality that would be obvious to others.
Dependent style (Personality): Well-being rests on connection; others are seen as stronger, and the self is defined through relationships.
Depressive position (Object Relations): Klein’s state of mind in which good and bad are held together, with guilt, sorrow and the wish to repair.
Depressive style (Personality): Organized around guilt, self-criticism and the sense of having lost or driven away what was good.
Devaluation of other’s image (Defenses): Attributing exaggeratedly negative qualities to someone else, often to prop up one’s own worth.
Devaluation of self-image (Defenses): Exaggerating one’s own faults, which looks like honesty and distorts the picture.
Differentiation and integration (Capacities): Telling self from other, fantasy from reality, past from present, while still connecting them.
Displacement (Defenses): Redirecting a feeling from its real target to a safer one.
Dissociation (Defenses): A break in the usual connection between memory, perception, identity or awareness under overwhelming stress.
Dissociative style (Personality): Keeping experiences apart that would ordinarily be connected, as a habitual way of coping.
Dyad (Object Relations): The basic unit of the inner world: a self, an other, and the feeling between them.

E

Emotionally dysregulated style (Personality): Feelings that arrive with overwhelming force, and closeness that brings fear of abandonment and engulfment at once.
Envy and gratitude (Inner Life): The wish to spoil what is good because it belongs to someone else, and the capacity to take it in instead.
Exploring one’s inner life (Capacities): Reflecting on the sources of one’s own mental states; what used to be called psychological mindedness.

F

False self (Object Relations): Winnicott’s self built around what the environment requires; healthy as politeness, costly when it is all there is.
Frameworks and thinkers (Personality): How the field has approached personality over a century, from Freud’s character types to the PDM-3.

G

Guilt (Inner Life): “I did something bad,” focused on a specific act and what it did to someone else; contrast shame.

H

Healthy level of organization (Personality): Most capacities well developed and reliably present, with enough flexibility to adapt to hard realities.
Help-rejecting complaining (Defenses): Bringing problems to people and turning down every suggestion.
Holding and containment (Object Relations): Winnicott’s and Bion’s pictures of how another mind helps us bear what we cannot yet bear alone.
Humor (Defenses): Noticing the amusing or ironic side of a conflict without losing sight of the problem or the feelings.
Hypomanic style (Personality): A depressive core held at bay by energy, wit and optimism.
Hysterical–histrionic style (Personality): Moving toward people, with feeling and drama in the foreground and a fear of being overpowered underneath.

I

Idealization of other’s image (Defenses): Exaggerating the positive qualities of another person.
Idealization of self-image (Defenses): Inflating one’s own worth directly.
Identification (Object Relations): Becoming like the people we love, fear, or swear we will never resemble.
Impulse regulation (Capacities): Expressing needs and urges flexibly, without unmodulated impulsivity or rigid overcontrol.
Intellectualization (Defenses): Thinking about a difficulty in abstract terms so as not to feel it.
Internal Family Systems (Compared To): Managers, firefighters, exiles and the Self, next to self-states, defenses and internal objects.
Internal objects (Object Relations): The people we have taken inside: the inner critic, the inner comforter, the cast of the inner world.
Internal standards and ideals (Capacities): A personal, coherent morality and set of ideals that guide choices.
Internal working model (Object Relations): Bowlby’s term for the expectations about self and other that a child builds from experience and carries forward.
Isolation of affects (Defenses): Losing touch with the feelings tied to an experience while remaining aware of its facts.

L

Levels of personality organization (Personality): Healthy, neurotic, borderline and psychotic, distinguished by identity, defenses, reality testing and relationships.

M

Masochistic (self-defeating) style (Personality): A recurring pull toward situations that hurt, because suffering has come to feel like the price of love or safety.
Mental capacities (Personality): The thirteen capacities of the PDM-3 that together make up overall psychological functioning.
Mentalization (Capacities): Keeping one’s own and other people’s minds in view as minds, and noticing when a feeling hardens into a fact.
Mourning and loss (Object Relations): How we take in the people we lose, from Freud and Klein to the grief research of the last thirty years.

N

Narcissistic style (Personality): Self-esteem that depends heavily on outside affirmation, hidden by confidence or showing as shame.
Neurotic level of organization (Personality): Sound identity and reality testing, with certain stresses meeting a narrow, rigid range of responses.

O

Object (Object Relations): In the old vocabulary, the person toward whom feeling is directed; the word is technical, not cold.
Object constancy (Object Relations): Keeping a whole person in mind through anger, absence and disappointment.
Object relations (Object Relations): The family of psychoanalytic ideas about the inner cast of characters and how it shapes later relationships.
Obsessive–compulsive style (Personality): Organized around control, order and doing things right, with feeling held at a distance.
Omnipotence (Defenses): Acting as if one possessed special powers, with an “I can handle anything” attitude.

P

Paranoid style (Personality): Unbearable feelings disowned and located in other people, who then seem threatening.
Paranoid-schizoid position (Object Relations): Klein’s state of mind in which good and bad are kept apart and the bad is felt as persecution.
Passive aggression (Defenses): Hiding resentment behind apparent compliance.
Pathogenic beliefs (Inner Life): Grim convictions about oneself or the world, learned early, that keep a person from what they want.
Patterns (Patterns): The things people actually bring, in plain words, and where each one leads on this site.
Personality (Personality): The enduring style underneath, described in the language of contemporary psychodynamic diagnosis.
Personality styles (Personality): Fifteen recognizable configurations, each described from healthy to severe.
Projection (Defenses): Attributing one’s own unacknowledged feeling to someone else.
Projective identification (Defenses): Disowning a feeling, seeing it in the other person, and often provoking them into feeling it too.
Psychopathic style (Personality): Organized around power and getting the better of others, with little anxiety and little inner restraint.
Psychotic level of organization (Personality): Identity diffusion, poor self–other differentiation, and marked deficits in reality testing.

R

Rationalization (Defenses): Concealing one’s real motives behind reassuring but incorrect explanations.
Reaction formation (Defenses): Turning an unacceptable feeling into its opposite.
Repetition compulsion (Inner Life): Freud’s name for the tendency to live out again what cannot yet be remembered and thought about.
Repression (Defenses): The idea goes missing while the feeling stays.
Resistance (How It Works): Defense in action when it meets someone trying to look past it; why clinicians retired the word and Geist does not use it.
Rupture and repair (Object Relations): Why strains in a relationship, once worked through, can deepen it.

S

Sadistic style (Personality): Organized around domination and control of people who are weaker.
Schizoid style (Personality): Withdrawal from a world that feels engulfing, with a rich inner life and a deep conflict about needing anyone.
Self-assertion (Defenses): Expressing feelings and opinions directly, without hostility or manipulation.
Self-esteem regulation (Capacities): A sense of worth that is neither unrealistically high nor low, and varies sensibly with the situation.
Self-observation (Defenses): Reflecting on one’s own thoughts, feelings and behavior, and seeing oneself as others do.
Selfobjects (Object Relations): Kohut’s account of the people who mirror us, steady us, and keep our sense of self intact.
Self-states (Inner Life): Why one person can feel like several: the frightened child, the coper, the inner critic, the steadier adult.
Shadow work (Compared To): Jung’s shadow, next to repression, projection and what a defense is afraid of.
Shame (Inner Life): “I am bad,” with the whole self exposed and defective; contrast guilt.
Somatizing style (Personality): Emotional pain expressed through the body rather than in words.
Splitting of other’s image (Defenses): Seeing someone as all bad, often right after they were all good, with no way to combine the two.
Splitting of self-image (Defenses): Seeing oneself as all bad at one moment and all good at another.
Sublimation (Defenses): Channeling a feeling into something socially valued, often creative.
Suppression (Defenses): Deliberately postponing a feeling about a present problem until there is time to deal with it.

T

Transference (Object Relations): How old relationships are relived with new people, including institutions and machines.
Transitional object (Object Relations): Winnicott’s blanket or toy that stands in for the caregiver before an inner image can do the job alone.
True self (Object Relations): Winnicott’s source of spontaneous gesture: the impulse, the want, the reaching-out that nobody asked for.
Trust, empathy and intimacy (Capacities): Trusting with discrimination, responding to others’ feelings, and adjusting closeness to each relationship.

U

Undoing (Defenses): Words or behavior meant to symbolically cancel out an unacceptable thought, feeling or act.

V

Vicious circles (Inner Life): Wachtel’s loops: a fear leads to a behavior, the behavior draws responses that confirm the fear, and it runs again.

W

What a defense is afraid of (Defenses): The specific feeling or scene each defense is protecting against, which matters more than the defense’s name.
Working through (How It Works): Freud’s name for meeting the same pattern in different forms until it loses its grip.