psychoanalytic theory (ECE 1)

• Sigmund Freud


  Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, founder of psychoanalysis
• Psychoanalysis


  • Technique that revealed the person's unconscious or innermost thoughts, feelings, dreams, and dilemmas by talking about his or her experiences, childhood, and past
• Freud focused on the reasons for the abnormal behavior of adults, but his studies were key to how personality develops from childhood
• Play


  Served a cathartic purpose, used by children to express their hidden feelings and thoughts, provided opportunities to understand distressing experiences and explore ways to replace unlikable feelings to more likeable ones, figure out what was happening, and connect "symbolic properties of people and objects in the present and past"
• Freud's fundamental drives


  • Sexual drive
  • Survival instinct
  • Drive for violence
• Psychosexual theory of development

  1. Different stages children go through

  2. Major test for each stage is connected to the pleasure a child gets from a specific part of the body

  3. If a child goes through each stage without any crisis and all his or her needs are satisfied, he or she transitions to the next stage of development

  4. If a child encounters a problem in a particular stage and his or her needs are not met, problematic behavior related to the specific stage arises
• Stages of psychosexual development

  • Oral Stage (Birth to 2 years)
  • ...
• Oral Stage

  • The child finds pleasure in sucking where he or she obtains oral pleasure, the focal body part is the mouth, the activities focus on eating and teething
  • If the child is overly stimulated or is not fully satisfied, he or she develops a fixation with oral activities, like eating, smoking, or drinking alcohol
  • The child will develop into an adult whose personality is excessively reliant or excessively hostile toward other people