Literally,’self-centred’, an interest in oneself to the point of excluding any interest in other people. In PIAGET’S  theory of development, the term does not have any pejorative connotation of selfishness but refers to a stage that lasts until the age of 7 or 8, where a child is unable to adopt someone else’s perceptual frame of reference and see a situation through his eyes. Thus, a child at this stage is unable to describe what an object looks like to someone sitting across the table from him he describes it the way it appears to him. The child’s conceptual, cognitive world is similarly egocentric. A ‘foreigner’, for instance, is always a foreigner, even in his own country, but the child himself is never a foreigner even in someone else’s country. This stage ends when the child achieves RECIPROCITY, though egocentric behaviour can often be observed in adults.

An experimental method in which neither the subject nor the experimenter is aware of the point at which the experimental manipulation is introduced. Used especially in EXPERIMENTS with drugs where neither subject nor experimenter knows which drug is being administered when and to whom. The technique is an attempt to overcome the CONSCIOUS and UNCONSCIOUS effects of EXPERIMENTAL BIAS.

American term for LEVELS OF PROCESSING.

Sometimes used in SOCIOLOGY to indicate BEHAVIOUR designed to mask real feelings by presenting what appears to be a different feeling.

A MANIA that takes the form of a periodic craving for alcohol. Unlike chronic alcoholism the patient is not DEPENDENT on a daily intake of alcohol and his bouts of drinking are thought to be symptomatic of a deep-lying emotional disorder.

See ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPH.

Used in at least three senses (and sometimes written ‘dependency’)

(1) In science generally, if one thing is thought to be caused by another it is said to be dependent on it.

(2) In CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY, a person is said to be dependent on someone or something to the extent that he needs that thing or person in order to go about his regular activities.

(3) In SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, it is sometimes used to refer to the way in which people in a group rely on each other for a definition of reality.

In PSYCHOANALYSIS, the form in which a repressed wish appears in a DREAM.

An impairment of word PERCEPTION involving a loss of ability to read or understand words. Contrast with ALEXIA.

Literally, the ‘I’, the CONSCIOUS AWARENESS of oneself (one’s SELF). According to FREUD the ego is that part of the PERSONALITY closest to external reality which holds the ring between the UNCONSCIOUS DRIVES of the pleasure seeking ID on the one hand and the internalised restrictions of the SUPEREGO on the other. NEUROSIS, in Freud’s view, is thus the result of the ego being unable to maintain harmonious relations with the id and superego because the power of their unconscious drives is too much for it to cope with.