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Factitious Disorders
Conditions in which physical and/or psychological symptoms are fabricated in order to place an individual in the role of a patient or sick person in need of help.
Fantasy
An imagined sequence of events or mental images (e.g., daydreams) that serves to express unconscious conflicts, to gratify unconscious wishes, or to prepare for anticipated future events.
Flashback
A recurrence of a memory, feeling, or perceptual experience from the past.
Flat affect
An affect type that indicates the absence of signs of affective expression.
Flight of ideas
A nearly continuous flow of accelerated speech with abrupt changes from topic to topic that are usually based on understandable associations, distracting stimuli, or plays on words. When severe, speech may be disorganized and incoherent.
Flooding
(implosion) A behavior therapy procedure for phobias and other problems involving maladaptive anxiety, in which anxiety producers are presented in intense forms, either in imagination or in real life. The presentations, which act as desensitizers, are continued until the stimuli no longer produce disabling anxiety.
Formal thought disorder
An inexact term referring to a disturbance in the form of thinking rather than to abnormality of content. See blocking; loosening of associations; poverty of speech.
Formication
The tactile hallucination or illusion that insects are crawling on the body or under the skin.
Free association
In psychoanalytic therapy, spontaneous, uncensored verbalization by the patient of whatever comes to mind.
Fusion
The union and integration of the instincts and drives so that they complement each other and help the organism to deal effectively with both internal needs and external demands.
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