Psychoanalytic frameworks for self-understanding

Psychoanalytic theory, from Freud through Klein, Winnicott, and Kohut, offers detailed maps of the unconscious processes that organize experience without the knowing mind's awareness. The mechanisms of defense — repression, projection, splitting — are the citta's automatic strategies for managing what it cannot yet tolerate knowing. While the specific theoretical architectures vary widely, the shared contribution is the discovery that much of mental life operates beneath deliberate awareness, and that bringing it into light is itself curative.