Psychodynamic Approach

• What is the Unconscious?

  • Freud suggests that the part of our mind we know about is the ‘conscious mind’
  • Most of the mind is the ‘unconscious’ - a storehouse of biological drives and instincts that influence our personality and behaviour
  • Contains threatening and disturbing memories - does this to proven feelings of anxiety and trauma
  • Just before the conscious is the pre-conscious, including thoughts and ideas we may be aware of during dreams or slips of the tongue (parapaxes
  • )
• The Structure of the Personalty

  Freud described personality as ‘tripartite’

  Contains the Id, Ego and Superego
• The Id

  • the primitive part of our personality
  • operates on the pleasure principle - the Id gets what it wants
  • A mass of unconscious drives ad instincts
  • Only personality component present from birth (Freud calls babies ‘bundles of Id’)
  • the Id is entirely selfish and demands instant gratification of its needs
• The Ego

  • Works on the reality principle
  • The mediator between the two other parts of the personality
  • Develops around the age of two
  • Role is to reduce the conflict between the demands of the Id and the superego - does so through defence mechanisms
• The Superego

  • Formed at the end of the phallic stagE, around age 5
  • It is our internalised sense of right and wrong
  • Based on the morality principle, it represents the moral standards of the child’s same-gender parent and punishes the Ego for wrongdoing (through guilt)
• Defence mechanisms

  They are psychological strategies that are unconsciously used to protect a person from anxiety arising from unacceptable thoughts or feelings, there are three:

  • Repression - Forcing a distressing memory out of the conscious mind
  • Denial - Refusing to acknowledge some aspects of reality
  • Displacement - Transferring feelings from true source of distressing emotion onto a substitute target
• Freud claimed personality development in childhood takes place during 5 psychosexual stages.

  Each stage is marked by a different conflict that the child must resolve to successfully move to the next stage

  If the conflict isn’t solved, the child will become fixated - unsolved conflicts affect future personality
• The 5 Psychosexual stages

  1. Oral (0-1years): Pleasure focus is mouth, mother’s breast is object of desire (OoD) -> unsolved conflicts (UC) = Oral fixation - smoking, biting nails, sarcastic, critical
  2. Anal (1-3yrs): Pleasure focus is the anus. Child pleasure in withholding and expelling faeces -> UC = Anal retentive - perfectionist, obsessive & Anal expulsive - thoughtless,messy
• 3. Phallic (3-5yrs): Pleasure focus is genitalia - Child experience Oedipus complex or Electra complex -> UC = Castration anxiety, penis envy, Phallic personality - narcissistic, reckless, possibly homosexual

  4. Latency: Earlier conflicts are repressed

  5. Genital: Sexual desires become conscious alongside the onset of puberty -> UC = Difficulty forming heterosexual relationships
• Oedipus Complex

  Boys developing incestuous feelings towards their mothers and murderous hatred towards their fathers (perceived love rival). Boys envy the affection their mothers gives their father and so, hate him. Boys repress these feelings in fear their father will castrate them (castration anxiety). To cope with the anxiety, they go onto identify with their father and mirror his gender role and moral values. Father goes from rival to role model
• Electra Complex

  Girls develop incestuous feelings towards their father. It begins with the belief that one has already been castrated. She blames the mother for this and experience penis envy. Girls are said to give up the desire for their fathers and over time replace this with a desire for a baby - hence, identifying with the mother
• Little Hans case study (5 years old) - support for the Oedipus

  • Hans had a fascination with his penis and other people’s, even asking his mother if she had one - she told him that if he kept playing with it, shed cut it off
  • Had a phobia of horses - Freud interpreted this as being symbolic of his father and that Hans feared the horse biting him (castration) because of his incestuous feelings for his mother
  • Horse represented father because they possess larger penises and the dark facial features on some ones represented the father’s moustache
  • Hans did witness a horse collapse ad die on the street onetime in his early childhood though