APPROACHES: The Psychodynamic Approach
The Psychodynamic Approach
The role of the unconscious
- Most of our mind is made up of the unconscious
- Unconscious has a significant influence on our behaviour/personality
- Contains threatening and disturbing memories
- Under surface of conscious mind is preconscious - parapraxes
The structure of personality: tripartite structure
- Id - pleasure principle - only the id is present at birth - entirely selfish - immediate gratification
- Ego - reality principle - mediator - develops around age of 2 years- reduce conflict between id and superego - defence mechanisms
- Superego - morality principle - formed at end of phallic stage
Defence mechanisms
- Unconscious
- Ensures that the ego is able to prevent us from being overwhelmed by temporary threats/traumas
- Often involve distortion of reality - psychologically unhealthy/undesirable
- Repression: forcing a distressing memory out of conscious mind
- Denial: refusing to acknowledge some aspect of reality
- Displacement: transferring feelings from true source of distressing emotion onto a substitute target
Psychosexual stages of development
EVALUATION
Explanatory power
- Huge influence on psychology and Western contemporary thought
- Dominant force in psychology for first half of 20th century
- Significant in drawing attention to the connection between experiences in childhood - relationship with our parents and later development
Case study method
- Detailed and carefully recorded - not possible to make such universal claims about human nature based on studies of a small sample of psychologically abnormal individuals
- Highly subjective
- Unlikely that any other researcher would have drawn the same conclusions
- Lacks scientific rigour
The Oedipus complex and Little Hans
- In phallic stage, little boys develop incestuous feelings towards mother and murderous hatred for their father(the Oedipus complex)
- Fear that their father will castrate them, boys repress feelings for their mother and identify with father - gender role and moral values
- Girls of some age experience penis envy - desire their father and hate their mother(the Electra complex)
- Freud was less clear on process in girls
- Girls are thought to give up desire for father over time - replace with desire for a baby
- Supported this with case study of Little Hans
- 5 year old boy who developed a phobia of horses
- Freud suggested that Hans' phobia was a form of displacement - repressed fear of father transferred onto horses
- Horses were a symbolic representation of Hans' real unconscious fear: fear of castration experienced during Oedipus complex
Untestable concepts
- Popper - psychodynamic approach doesn't meet scientific criterion of falsification - not open to empirical testing
- Difficult, or impossible, to test unconscious
- Popper - psychodynamic theory is a pseudoscience(fake)
Practical application
- Psychoanalysis(therapy) - hypnosis and dream analysis
- Forerunner to many modern day psychotherapies
- Criticised as inappropriate/harmful for people with more serious mental disorders(schizophrenia)
Psychic determinism
- No such thing as "accident"
- Determined by unconscious conflicts rooted in childhood
- Any free will we think we may have is an illusion
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