abreaction


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abreaction

 [ab″re-ak´shun]
the expression of emotions associated with repressed material, usually of an anxiety-provoking or conflictual nature, which is brought into a person's awareness and relived. See also catharsis.
Miller-Keane Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing, and Allied Health, Seventh Edition. © 2003 by Saunders, an imprint of Elsevier, Inc. All rights reserved.

ab·re·ac·tion

(ab-rē-ak'shŭn),
In freudian psychoanalysis, an episode of emotional release or catharsis associated with the conscious recollection of repressed unpleasant experiences.
Farlex Partner Medical Dictionary © Farlex 2012

abreaction

Emotional release or discharge associated with recall and resolution of mental trauma experienced and repressed in childhood. A therapeutic effect may occur through partial discharge or desensitisation of the painful emotions and increased insight.
Segen's Medical Dictionary. © 2012 Farlex, Inc. All rights reserved.

abreaction

Psychiatry Emotional release or discharge associated with remembering and resolving repressed mental trauma experienced and repressed in childhood. See False memory.
McGraw-Hill Concise Dictionary of Modern Medicine. © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

ab·re·ac·tion

(ab-rē-ak'shŭn)
freudian psychoanalysis An emotional release or catharsis associated with the recollection of previously repressed unpleasant experiences.
Medical Dictionary for the Health Professions and Nursing © Farlex 2012

abreaction

A process used in PSYCHOTHERAPY in which repressed thoughts and feelings are brought into consciousness and ‘relived’. Abreaction is, it is hoped, followed by CATHARSIS and is most readily achieved when the trouble arises from a recent traumatic event.
Collins Dictionary of Medicine © Robert M. Youngson 2004, 2005
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References in periodicals archive ?
Zimmerman implies that viewing these turbulent scenes might be akin to abreaction, whereby the audience relives its own losses vicariously through the characters' words and gestures.
Zimmerman's Metamorphoses: mythic revision as a ritual for grief
For those of us who have performed an Asian music (not our "own") Wong ably captures and parses the experience wholly in "Taiko in Asian America," allowing us a powerful abreaction through her fascinating and thoughtful inquiry into the dense interracial and interpersonal politics of a taiko group.
Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music
It needs no Freud to observe that her life since the moment of her mother releasing her hand has been a failed abreaction, a reliving of the moment and, failing that, an attempt to recreate the lost milieu in which her mother lived.
Two Holocaust survivors and two rock stars
Such was the foundational aim of psychoanalysis: by making a distressing event available to a consciousness, one renders it susceptible to abreaction and associative dissipation.
The poetics of ruptured mnemosis: telling encounters in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!
This process includes first identifying with the main character's needs, wishes, and frustrations; followed by experiencing an emotional release through abreaction and catharsis; and finally gaining insight into solutions to their own problems by identifying the characters' coping strategies (Pardeck, 1990; Pardeck & Pardeck).
Helping children cope with fears: using children's literature in classroom guidance
Margaret Canby herself said as much, writing, "Under the circumstances, I do not see how any one can be so unkind as to call it a plagiarism; it is a wonderful feat of memory." This is a fair and judicious response, much fairer and more judicious than the bizarre abreaction of Keller's earliest and strongest supporter, Michael Anagnos, who was undone by the "Frost King" episode and eventually declared that "Helen Keller is a living lie." And yet it raises a profound question: What if all Helen Keller's utterances amounted to wonderful feats of memory?
Written in Memory
(5-6) With this loss of "headlong energy" the narrator risks, in Breuer and Freud's terms, an insufficient abreaction of the motivating trauma: "the injured person's reaction to the trauma only exercises a completely 'cathartic' effect if it is an adequate reaction--as, for instance, revenge" (Studies on Hysteria, 8).
Deliberate unknowing and strategic retelling: the ravages of cultural desire in Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly
Unfortunately, the result is more embarrassment than abreaction. The costumes are a curious mixture of ancient and contemporary, with armor that seems here and there to have been purloined from a Roman epic.
Flogging a Trojan Horse - Tantalus Fails to Tantalize
They are "the dreadful evil [which] stalks in the forest of her dark mind." There is recognition in this tragedy of the destructive (non-survival) effect of this kind of evaluation; there is recognition, too, of the abreaction that may result from the expression of emotional and mental conflicts.
Fifty years ago in etc. (Retrospect)
Many factors, such as word choice, organization, suitability to reader and discourse community, and numerous other rhetorical considerations, influence readers' perception of "good writing." The factor provoking instant and powerful abreaction from a reader, however, is often a perceived error in grammar or usage.
Big Stuff, Little Stuff: A Decennial Measurement of Executives' and Academics' Reactions to Questionable Usage Elements
My heartbeat settles to a slower rhythm, but I feel, vaguely, that I'm waiting for the visual abreaction that will settle everything once and for all, meaning once and for me.
Movies are a mother to me...
Another believes in the abreaction of all emotion--and so he must have abreacted all his own emotions.
The Relationship Among Substance Abuse Counselors' Spiritual Well-Being, Values, and Self-Actualizing Characteristics and the Impact on Clients' Spiritual Well-Being

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