Incubation (psychology)
The term incubation has various uses in psychology and psychoanalysis and usually describes a phase of the latent effect of psychological processes.
psychology
In Wallas' (1926) five-phase theory of creative problem-solving, incubation is the time in which one does not consciously work on the problem, but comes closer to a solution. Unconsciously, old, sterile associations are dissolved and new ones are formed instead, which can lead to insight .
Similarly, memory content can sometimes be better extracted from long-term memory by stopping consciously looking for it. This time is also called incubation.
Psychoanalysis
In depth psychology and psychoanalysis, psychological incubation refers to the fact that some symptoms that can be traced back to trauma do not have to appear immediately after the traumatic experience. It does not exist , for example , in trauma in the sense of a post-traumatic stress disorder , but only in trauma that suppresses imaginary contents that are harmless in themselves but assessed differently by the patient .
The term goes back to Sigmund Freud and is now only used in classical psychoanalysis. The trauma does not take effect immediately. The personality is often strong enough to counteract, balance and compensate for the psychodynamic processes taking place internally . Children in particular can remain symptom-free for a long time.
Mental incubation can drag on for many years, during which people remain stable and relatively symptom-free. Symptoms of lesser severity are occasional but can be masked. In this dubbing, however, one also discovers in otherwise symptom-free people the effort of the ego to defend itself against unconscious ideas. If traumatic experiences accumulate or if the personality is weakened by other living conditions (loneliness, sexual isolation, humiliating or other influences), the symptoms break out.
There are various explanatory models for the causes of psychological incubation. In general one could summarize that all psychoanalytic explanations assume that unconscious processes have to be organized (systematized) little by little in order to be able to occur with a certain strength.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Joachim Funke : Problem-solving thinking . Kohlhammer 2003, p. 48