Psychoanalysis

How to spell psychoanalysis

14 letters · 6 syllables

How to pronounce psychoanalysis

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does psychoanalysis mean?

1. nounA method of treating mental and emotional difficulties by exploring unconscious thoughts, memories, and desires, developed by Sigmund Freud.

Psychoanalysis in a sentence

• After years of psychoanalysis, she finally understood the roots of her anxiety.

• The clinic offered both medication and long-term psychoanalysis to its patients.

Where does psychoanalysis come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is built from two Greek elements that English assembled relatively recently. The first part comes from the Greek psyche, meaning 'breath', 'life', or 'soul', which in time came to stand for the mind itself; the second part is analysis, from the Greek analusis, literally 'a loosening up' or 'an unpicking', made from ana 'throughout' and lysis 'a loosening or releasing'. The term was coined in French as psychanalyse and in German as Psychoanalyse by Sigmund Freud in the 1890s to name his method of exploring the mind by unpicking dreams, memories, and slips of the tongue. English took it on around 1906, keeping the full Greek-flavoured spelling with its silent 'p' at the front and its 'ch' standing for a hard 'k' sound. The same psyche root powers familiar relatives such as psychology and psychiatry, while the lysis ending also appears in words like dialysis and paralysis, which is a useful reminder that the word ends in '-lysis', not '-lisis'.

How the word is built

• psycho- (mind, soul)
• ana- (up, throughout)
• lysis (a loosening, dissolving) [combined as analysis] = the loosening apart of the mind