psychodynamic appraoch

• The three parts of the mind suggested by Freud are:

  • Conscious – what we are aware of
  • Preconscious – thoughts we may become aware of through dreams and accidental talking
  • Unconscious – a vast Storehouse of biological drives an instinct that influence our behaviour
• Three parts of personality suggested by Floyd are:

  • Id –primitive part of the personality operates on the pleasure principle, demands instant gratification
  • Ego – works on the reality principle and is a mediator between Id and the Superego
  • Superego – internalised sense of right and wrong, based on the morality principle. Punishes the Ego through guilt and appears age 5
• five psychosexual stages are:

  • oral (0-1 years)- pleasure focus is mouth and the mother's breast is the object of desire
  • anal (1-3 years)- pleasure focus is anus and the child gains pleasure from withholding and eliminating faeces
  • phallic (3-6)- pleasure focus is genital area
  • latency- earlier conflicts are repressed
  • genital (puberty)- sexual desires become conscious
• each psychosexual stage is marked by a different conflict that the child must resolve to move onto the next. Any conflict that is unresolved leads to fixation where the child becomes 'stuck' and carries behaviours associated with that stage through to adult life
• the oedipus complex occurs in the phallic stage and it is when boys develop incestuous feelings towards their mother and a murderous hatred for their father. Later boys repress their feelings for their mother and identify with their father, taking on his gender role and moral valves. Girls of the same age experience penis envy
• unconscious defence mechanisms used by the Ego:

  • repression- forcing a distressing memory out of the conscious mind
  • denial- refusing to acknowledge reality
  • displacement- transferring feelings from their true source onto a substitute target
• One strength of psychodynamic approach is it introduced psychotherapy. Freud's psychoanalysis was the first attempt to treat mental disorders psychologically rather than physically. Psychoanalysis claims to help clients deal with everyday problems by providing access to their unconscious, employing techniques such as dream analysis. Therefore psychoanalysis is the forerunner to many modern day talking therapies like counselling.
• One strength of a psychodynamic approach is my has explanatory power. Freud's theory is controversial and often bizarre, but it has had huge influence on contemporary thought. It has been used to explain a wide range of behaviours and drew attention to the influence of childhood on adult personality. This suggests that, overall, the psychodynamic approach has had a positive influence on psychology and modern day thinking
• One limitation of a psychodynamic appraoch include untestable concepts. Popper argued that they psychodynamic approach does not meet the scientific criterion of falsification, in the sense that it cannot be disproved. Many of Freud's concepts, such as the Id or the Oedipus complex, occur at an unconscious level making them difficult, if not impossible to test. This means that Freud's ideas lack scientific rigour, the theory is pseudoscience rather than real science