The term 'target' operates across several distinct registers within the depth-psychology corpus, and its precise meaning shifts markedly depending on the theoretical framework in which it appears. In EMDR literature, most fully developed by Shapiro, 'target' designates the specific traumatic memory or distressing incident that becomes the focal point of bilateral stimulation and reprocessing — a technically delimited object of therapeutic intervention situated within a memory network. Schwartz, writing from within the Internal Family Systems paradigm, repurposes the term to denote a 'target part': a discrete sub-personality selected for focused internal inquiry, distinguished from reactive parts through the felt-sense question 'How do you feel toward it?' In emotion psychology, Lench and the contributors she assembles configure 'target' as the interpersonal object of an emotion's coercive or regulatory strategy — most prominently in the phenomenology of anger, where the target is the person whose behavior one seeks to change. Psychotherapy outcome research, particularly Leichsenring's meta-analyses of long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy, employs 'target problems' as a standard measurement category alongside symptom severity and social functioning. Finally, neurocognitive research on ADHD (Rubia, Wong) uses 'target' in a strictly operationalized stimulus-detection sense. The term thus traverses clinical protocol, parts-psychology, emotion theory, outcome measurement, and experimental neuropsychology — making it a site of productive, if underacknowledged, conceptual plurality.
In the library
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Every time we want to talk to a target part, and also any time we suspect another part has taken over from the client's Self during the process of interviewing a target part, we ask the question: How do you feel toward the target part?
Schwartz establishes 'target part' as the IFS technical term for the internal sub-personality selected for therapeutic focus, with relational orientation toward it serving as the primary diagnostic of Self-led versus part-led engagement.
Schwartz, Richard C, Internal Family Systems Therapy, 1995thesis
different instantiations of anger are recognizable as alternative means to attaining the emotivational goals of making the target feel bad, or compelling the target's action. All may be understood as in some way manifesting anger's function of coercing the target to change behavior
Lench and Roseman define 'target' as the interpersonal object of anger's coercive function, arguing that all variable expressions of anger share the unifying goal of compelling behavioral change in a specific other person.
Lench, Heather C., The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018thesis
The very existence of negative cognitions is an indication that the traumatic event is a powerfully defining factor in the person's life, one that has not yet been adequately assimilated into an adaptive framework.
Shapiro frames the EMDR target — the unprocessed traumatic memory — as identifiable through persistent negative cognitions, whose presence signals failure of adaptive integration and thus the need for targeted reprocessing.
Shapiro, Francine, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures, 2001thesis
a loved one or friend was the target in 54% of anger instances... an impulse to revenge in only 2%. Parent-child anger may be similar, with instances of actually wanting to hurt the target being relatively rare.
Empirical data on anger incidents show that the target is overwhelmingly an intimate other, and that the coercive goal of anger rarely extends to genuine harm-seeking, complicating simpler aggressive-impulse models.
Lench, Heather C., The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018supporting
At the time of writing about his experience, participant 26 said of the target of his anger 'If I saw him now, I guess I wouldn't be able to keep control over myself'
Phenomenological data illustrate how the target of anger retains ongoing psychological salience, with the emotion persisting as an unresolved motivational state oriented toward a specific person.
Lench, Heather C., The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018supporting
LTPP alone yielded significant effect sizes for overall outcome, target problems, general psychiatric symptoms, and social functioning at posttest time points
Leichsenring's meta-analysis employs 'target problems' as a discrete outcome domain in psychotherapy research, treating client-nominated focal difficulties as a primary efficacy measure alongside symptom and functioning indices.
Leichsenring, Falk, Effectiveness of Long-term Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: A Meta-analysis, 2008supporting
The outcome measurement tables in Leichsenring's review systematically distinguish 'target problems' as a separate evaluative category from general symptom measures and personality functioning in long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy studies.
Leichsenring, Falk, Effectiveness of Long-term Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: A Meta-analysis, 2008supporting
The fMRI analysis contrasts brain activation to correct non-rewarded target trials with that of non-target trials in order to measure effects of vigilant, selective attention.
In experimental neuropsychology of ADHD, 'target' is operationalized as the designated stimulus requiring response, with target-versus-non-target contrasts indexing vigilant attention and reward-modulated performance.
Rubia, Katya, Methylphenidate normalises activation and functional connectivity deficits in attention and motivation networks in medication-naïve children with ADHD during a rewarded continuous performance task, 2009supporting
Medication reduced target [F(1,17) = 4.437, p =.050] and foil reaction times... with largest gains at the lowest load.
Wong's working memory study uses target reaction time as the primary cognitive performance metric, showing that stimulant medication differentially reduces target response latency with effects modulated by cognitive load.
Wong, Christina G., The Effects of Stimulant Medication on Working Memory Functional Connectivity in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disordersupporting
the decades of the 1970s and 1980s were marked by an explosion of scholarship on the psychological experiences and needs of target groups, with volumes dedicated to women, African Americans, lesbians and gay men, older adults, people with disabilities
Courtois deploys 'target groups' in a sociological-clinical register to denote populations historically marginalized by dominant-culture epistemologies, framing cultural competence as attentiveness to within-group and between-group differences.
Courtois, Christine A, Treating Complex Traumatic Stress Disorders (Adults) supporting
It provides useful information for the next session, which helps with setting an agenda and deciding what to target first.
Harris uses 'target' in its common clinical planning sense — identifying which behavioral or psychological issue to address first — without theoretical elaboration, situating it within ACT session-structuring practice.
Harris, Russ, ACT Made Simple: An Easy-To-Read Primer on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, 2009aside
Attempts to talk over an angry incident with the instigator (Averill, 1982), or reconcile after a confrontation (Fischer & Roseman, 2007), may reduce or control (rather than manifest) the emotion.
This passage contextualizes variation in anger expression through emotion regulation processes, implicitly framing the target relationship as one modulated by social repair strategies rather than pure coercive escalation.
Lench, Heather C., The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018aside