dominant idea

Also found in: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia.

idea

[i-de´ah]

a mental impression or conception.

autochthonous idea a persistent idea, originating within the mind, usually from the unconscious, but seeming to have come from an outside source and often therefore felt to be of malevolent origin.

dominant idea one that controls or colors every action and thought.

fixed idea a persistent morbid impression or belief that cannot be changed by reason.

overvalued idea a false or exaggerated belief sustained beyond logic or reason but with less rigidity than a delusion, also often being less patently unbelievable.

idea of reference the incorrect idea that the words and actions of others refer to one's self, or the projection of the causes of one's own imaginary difficulties upon someone else.

dom·i·nant i·de·a

an idea that governs all one's actions and thoughts.

Farlex Partner Medical Dictionary © Farlex 2012

dom·i·nant i·de·a

(dom'i-nănt ī-dē'ă)

An idea that governs all one's actions and thoughts.

Medical Dictionary for the Health Professions and Nursing © Farlex 2012

dominant idea

An idea that controls all one's actions and thoughts.

See also: idea

Mentioned in ?

References in periodicals archive ?

Maintaining his central, 'dominant idea' position--"I endeavour to rid the mind at once of all ideas but one, and to fix that one in the mind even after passing into the hypnotic state" (Braid, 1843, p.

Emile Coue and his method (II): hypnotism, suggestion, ego-strengthening, and autosuggestion

It managed to establish a dominant idea and weaken the opposition, regardless of whether it benefitted the country.

Tories box clever - but they must be held to account; DAVID TAYLOR GOOBY raises concerns about media scrutiny of the government, amidst Westminster attempts to limit its ability to independently criticise

Dimmock's study follows a connecting thread of anti-Turkish demonization through the texts, and he concludes that the textual record from the reign of Henry VIII to the end of the century "reveal[s] how profoundly ingrained the central tenets of a dominant idea of the 'turke' in English culture remained, complicated by political and mercantile circumstance yet broadly unchanged from that cultivated by More and Tyndale in the 1520s" (195).

New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England

Viewing the history of the Left as a history of people creating such spaces of freedom is part of McKay's alternative to the dominant idea that the Left is "the dead, unlamented pipe dream of the twentieth century" (23) and to what he calls the sectarian and sentimental or scorecard approach to the history of the Left, in which writers defend the correctness of a particular political tendency.

Ian McKay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada's Left History

The rhizomatic challenges the dominant idea of knowledge acquisition that remains so prominent in education, Mainstream knowledge acquisition is viewed as a form of recognition and linear progression, where the metaphor is a tree or a staircase, where you have to take the first step before you move to the next in order.

Early childhood institutions as loci of ethical and political practice

Even readers sympathetic to Rosser's structural approach would agree that ideas do matter, and the dominant idea of the times was that markets work better than states.

The politics of economic liberalisation in Indonesia: State, market and power

Buchanan's ideal of a justice-based international order calls for the priority of justice over international peace, in contrast to the dominant idea that the goal of the international system should be peace among nations, which may leave room for gross injustices within states.

Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination: Moral Foundations for International Law

Reform, although the dominant idea of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, emphatically asserts itself in just one of these works--Burns' and Innes' Rethinking the Age of Reform.

Review essay: reform and social change

By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, however, the "come-outer movement" that had distinguished itself by espousing the heretical and feared doctrine of universal salvation, succumbed to the culturally dominant idea of moral seriousness and cultivation of the self.

The Universalist Movement in America: 1770-1880

[45] Usually they contain a hierarchy of ideational elements with one dominant idea and at least one main challenger.

Whence American Internationalism

He makes a powerful case against the dominant idea that the market is the best arbiter of social, political, and cultural change.