Psychodynamic

• The psychodynamic approach: a perspective that emphasises how unconscious forces, and childhood experiences operate on the mind and direct human behaviour
• The iceberg: conscious, pre conscious, unconscious
• Conscious: the part of the mind we know and are aware of
• Preconscious: contains thoughts and memories which are not currently in consciousness but we can access if desired
• Unconscious: biological drives and instincts we are unaware of or threatening disturbing images
• Accessing the unconsciousness: slip of the tongue, dreams
• Tripartite of personality: Id, superego, ego
• Id: pleasure principle, selfish, hedonistic, demands instant gratification, present from birth in the unconscious
• The superego: the morality principle, represents moral standards of the same sex parent and punishes the ego for wrong doing through guilt. formed at the end of the phallic stage through all levels of consciousness
• The ego: mediates, considerate, rationale, and employs defence mechanisms, develops age 2 in the conscious and preconscious
• oral: Age 0-2, focus of pleasure is the mouth and the mothers breast is the object of desire, the consequences are smoking, nail biting, sarcasm, critical
• Freuds psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital
• Anal: age 2-3 focus of pleasure is the anus, child gains pleasure by with holding and expelling faeces, consequences are retentive perfectionist or explusive and thoughtless
• Phallic: age 3-6, focus of pleasure is the genitals, child experiences oedipus or electra complex, consequences are narcissistic, reckless, homosexual
• Latency: age 6-12, previous conflicts are repressed
• Genital: maturity, sexual desires become conscious alongside the onset of puberty, difficulty forming heterosexual relationships
• Electra complex: a girl desired her father, but gets penis envy and wishes to be a boy which she represses and replaced with a desire for a baby. She blames her mother for her castrated state which is also repressed and then identifies with her mother
• Oedipus complex: a boy desires his mother and wishes to get rid of his father, he develops castration anxiety in the fear that the father will retaliate so he identifies with the father to hide it
• Electra: girls have less morals and are more reckless as the have penis envy and do not fear castration
• Oedipus: boys have more morals as they have castration anxiety causing them to think and act
• identification causes the development of the super ego
• Little Hans: supports the Oedipus complex. He was scared of horse. Horses have big penises, but he was less scared of them when they wore a black mask. The black mask and big penis made the horse “look like his father”. So he was transferring his castration anxiety from his father to horses
• Problems with little Hans evidence: it’s subjective and not generalisable
• Defence mechanisms: unconscious strategies that the ego uses to manage the conflict between the ID and the super ego
• types of defence mechanisms: repression, displacement, denial
• Repression: forcing a distressing Memory out of the conscious mind
• Denial: refusing to acknowledge some aspects of reality
• Displacement: transferring feelings from the true source of distressing emotions onto a substitute target
• Strengths of the psychodynamic approach:

  explanatory power - used to explain a lot of behaviour, dominated the first half of the 20th century

  practical application - psychoanalysis therapy used widely today, developed other therapies
• Weaknesses of psychodynamic approach:

  case study methods - lacking evidence, not scientific, can easily be explained by other approaches

  untestable concepts - cannot be proven or disproven due to in ability to access, relies on self report data

  psychic determinism - accessing the unconscious could just be random things, suggests we are a slave to our unconscious.