psychodynamic

• assumption 1: unconscious activity is the key determinate of how we behave
• assumption 2: we possess innate drives that energise out minds to motivate behaviour as we develop through our lives
• assumption 3: our personality consists of ID, ego and superego
• assumption 4: childhood experiences have significant importance in determining our personality when we reach adulthood
• the tripartite personality consists of the ID, ego and superego
• the ID drives us to satisfy selfish urges according to the pleasure principle, this exists from birth
• the ego acts rationally, balancing the ID and the superego, acts according to the reality principle, develops at 2-4 years
• the superego is concerned with keeping to moral norms, acts according to the morality principle, attempts to control the ID with feelings of guilt, develops at 4-5 years old
• freud believed that we progress through psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital
• during development, becoming fixated on one of these stages would restrict full development
• defence mechanisms are used to redirect emotions during conflict
• repression is the burying of an unpleasant thought or desire in the unconscious
• displacement is where emotions are directed away from their source or target and are directed towards other things
• denial is when a threatening thought is ignored or treated as if it were not true
• freud used psychoanalysis to bring unconscious activity to the conscious
• psychoanalysis consisted of free association and dream interpretation
• free association is where the patient expresses immediate unconscious thoughts as they happen
• dream interpretation analyses the latent content (underlying meaning) of manifest content (what was remembered from the dream)
• strengths:

  • freud highlighted link between childhood experience and adult characteristics
  • idiographic approach
  • some evidence supports the existence of defence mechanisms such as repression - williams (1994): adults can forget traumatic child sexual abuse
  • modern day psychiatry still uses freudian psychoanalytic techniques
• psychosexual stages

  • oral
  • anal
  • phallic
  • latency
  • genital
• oral stage

  0-1 years old, focus of pleasure is the mouth, mother’s breast is object of desire
• anal stage


  1-3 years old, focus of pleasure is anus
• phallic stage

  3-5 years old, focus of pleasure is genitals, oedipus and electra complex
• latency stage

  6-12 years old, earlier conflicts are repressed and forgotten
• genital stage

  12 - adulthood, sexual desires become conscious with onset puberty
• any unsolved psychosexual conflict leads to fixation - carries certain characteristics associated with that stage through to adult life