The Psychodynamic Approach

• three main assumptions of psychodynamic approach

  • personality (psyche) has a discernible structure (ID, ego and superego); that it is constructed by the passage through psychosexual stages of development throughout infancy and adolescence; and that the unconscious conflicts in the psyche are mediated by processes called defence mechanisms.
• what is the role of the unconscious?

  • Any traumatic events or memories from childhood are repressed into the unconscious mind and kept there, hidden from conscious awareness. However, psychodynamic theorists suggest that such events or memories are never truly forgotten and can be explored through psychoanalysis.
  • The unconscious mind can reveal itself in several ways including dreams, fantasies and slips of the tongue, otherwise known as ‘Freudian slips’.
• what are the 3 parts of the personality?

  1. Id: governed by pleasure principle. consists of primal urges which freud called drives and seeks nothing but please (present at birth)
  2. Ego: governed by the reality principle and is tasked with taming the id and balancing the demands of the superego. (develops around two years old)
  3. Superego: governed by the molarity principal. our sense of right and wrong. it is characterised by the 'inner voice that tells us we have crossed into the boundaries of unacceptable behaviour (develops around 5 years old)
• what are defence mechanisms?

  • Used by the ego in order to cope with the conflicting demands of the other two parts of the personality: the ID and superego.
  • The ego works by distorting reality so that the individual can continue with their everyday life without unpleasant feelings or memories dominating their conscious awareness.
• describe repression

  when a traumatic or distressing memory is forced out of conscious awareness and into the unconscious mind.
• describe denial

  involves a refusal to accept the truth or reality of a situation, acting as though nothing distressing has happened.
• describe displacement

  when the feelings towards a target individual cannot be expressed directly and are therefore transferred onto someone/something else.
• what are the 5 psychosexual stages? (1)

  1. oral (0-2): focus of pleasure is the mouth
  2. anal (2-3): focus on the anus. The child becomes aware of the reality principle imposed by the parents and must undergo potty training in order to control their bowel movements. It is during this stage the Ego develops.
  3. phallic (3-6): major feature of this stage is the Oedipus complex in which infant boys must overcome their unconscious sexual desire for their mother by identifying with their father. It is during this stage that the Superego develops.
• what are the 5 psychosexual stages? (2)

  4. latent (7-13): The sexual energy which has driven the previous stages now becomes latent, so the individual can focus on the world around them and form friendships.

  5. genital (13+): The final stage culminates with the psychosexual energy taking residence in the genitals, to be directed towards the formation of adult relationships.
• what does a fixation at each stage result in?

  1. Oral fixation: here a person might engage in behaviours like smoking, nail-biting, etc.
  2. Anal fixation can manifest in two ways. Anal retentive: here a person might become an obsessive perfectionist or Anal expulsive: here a person might be messy and thoughtless.
  3. Phallic fixation might manifest in reckless and narcissistic behaviours
  4. A person who becomes fixated at the genital stage might struggle to form heterosexual relationships.
• strengths of psychodynamic approach

  • enormously influential in both the practice of psychology and in our understanding of how culture operates. The evidence for these ideas is almost entirely clinical rather than empirical, and its scientific credibility is questionable. But few would deny that there are, in fact, unconscious motives and demonstrable defence mechanisms. These existential realities have allowed Freudian theory to maintain some hold on psychotherapeutic techniques, like psychoanalysis, which is still used to treat patients with deep-seated psychological health issues today.
• limitations of psychodynamic approach (1)

  • Freud’s ideas demonstrate a significant gender bias; his obsession with the Oedipus complex is intensely androcentric, and many would claim this makes them irrelevant to an understanding of women. But female psychoanalysts like Melanie Klein have shown that even gender-biased theories can be adapted to provide useful insights into female behaviour. Therefore, while Freud’s original ideas demonstrate a significant gender bias, his work has been used to develop important and influential theories that apply to women.
• limitations of psychodynamic approach (2)

  • Psychoanalytic theory has been criticised for being culturally biased. All of Freud’s patients came from the Viennese middle-class, and his universal generalisations were based on this highly unrepresentative sample. there is considerable evidence to suggest that it is only suitable for cultures where the discussion of personal problems is encouraged. This is more a practical limitation than a conceptual one, but it casts some doubt on the effectiveness of any therapeutic approach, for other cultures, based on psychoanalytic ideas.
• limitations of psychodynamic approach (3)

  • psychic determinism: suggests that human behaviour is governed by unconscious drives and early traumatic childhood experiences which are repressed into the unconscious mind. As such, an individual does not have free will over their behaviour
  • not empirically testable. For example, the human mind cannot be dissected to reveal the id, ego and superego. As a result, it is not scientific in its approach to explaining human behaviour since the understanding of behaviour relies solely on the subjective interpretation of the psychoanalyst.