Psychodynamic approach

• Assumptions

  • Unconscious mind - the driving force behind much of our behaviour so to understand behavioural issues we must delve into it
  • Insticts/drives - motivate our behaviour. We are driven by instincts as we develop
  • Childhood experience - makes us who we are, traumatic events can resurface in adulthood
• Freuds iceberg metaphor

  • Conscious - everyday thoughts and experience
  • Preconscious - thoughts and memories that aren’t accessible at all times but can be retrieved
  • Subconscious - deep, dark, shameful part that holds repressed thoughts, memories and feelings (e.g trauma ). Although repressed, they drive behaviour
• Freudian slip

  • faulty actions
  • Freud deemed them notable for revealing an unconscious thought, belief or motive (e.g calling your partner by your ex’s name)
• Little hans

  • Had a fear of horses
  • Freud said that hans was obsessed with his penis noticed that animals had larger penises than him (phallic stage)
  • His father had gone away and had his mothers attention and hans was jealous (Oedipus complex)
  • He had sexual attraction for his mother and saw his father as a rival (castration anxiety)
• Strengths

  • The psychodynamic approach introduced psychotherapy - the forerunner to ‘talking therapies’
  • Freud‘s psychoanalysis was the first attempt to treat mental disorders psychologically rather than physically
  • Claims to help clients deal with problems by providing access to their unconscious using techniques such as dream analysis
  • Has been used to explain a wide range of behaviours and drew attention to the affect of childhood on adult personality
• Weaknesses

  • It is not appropriate for serious mental disorders (e.g schizophrenia)
  • includes untestable concepts - Karl popper argued that it didn’t meat the scientific criterion of falsification (cannot be disproved)
  • Many of Freuds concepts occur at the unconscious level meaning it is difficult if not impossible to test
  • Classed as pseudoscience