Strengths

• Practical application - treatment in mental illness

  -Psychoanalysis involves use of free association.

  -Dream analysis allows patients to bring unconscious activity to conscious awareness and can be resolved which reduces the symptoms.
• Explanatory power 


  -Draws attention to the importance of childhood experiences impact on adult behaviours.
• Interactionist approach 


  -Freud considered adult personality/behaviours arise from innate biological drives and childhood interactions.

  -Not biology or social but is both.
• Supporting evidence - Oedipus complex (little Hans)

  -Little Hans had a phobia of horses. Freud said his phobia of being bitten by a horse was a manifestation of castration anxiety as a desire for his mother.

  -This is resolved by imagining that he has a bigger penis than his father.