The psychodynamic approach

• The role of the unconscious

  Freud's Role of the Unconscious

  • The conscious mind is the 'tip of the iceberg', containing biological drives and instincts influencing behavior and personality.

  • The unconscious contains repressed or forgotten threatening and disturbing memories.

  • The preconscious, a part of the conscious mind, includes thoughts and ideas that may be consciously recognized during dreams or through'slips of the tongue'.
• Structure of personality

  Freud's Tripartite Personality

  • The id: Primitive part of personality, operates on pleasure principle and demands immediate gratification.

  • The ego: Mediator between the id and superego, develops around two years and manages conflict through defense mechanisms.

  • The superego: Forms at the end of the phallic stage, represents moral standards of the same-sex parent and punishes the ego for wrongdoing.
• Psychosexual stages

  Freud's Child Development Stages

  • Child development occurs in five stages marked by conflict resolution.

  • Unresolved psychosexual conflict leads to fixation, causing'stuck' behavior and conflicts.

  • These behaviors and conflicts persist into adulthood.
• 1. oral (0-1 years)

  • focus of pleasure - mouth, mother’s breast - object of desire
  • Consequence - oral fixation - smoking, biting nails, sarcastic, critical
• 2. Anal (1-3 years)

  • Focus of pleasure is the anus. Child gains pleasure from withholding and expelling faeces.
  • Anal retentive -perfectionist, obsessive.

  Anal expulsive - thoughtless, messy.
• 3. Phallic (3-5 yrs)

  • Focus of pleasure is the genital area.

  Child experiences the Oedipus or Electra complex

  • Phallic personality - narcissistic, reckless, possibly homosexual.
• 4. Latency

  • Earlier conflicts are repressed.
• 5. genital

  • sexual desires become conscious alongside puberty
  • difficulty performing heterosexual relationships
• Defence Mechanisms

  Ego's Balancing Role

  • Ego struggles to balance id and superego demands.

  • Unconscious defence mechanisms prevent overwhelm from temporary threats or traumas.

  • These mechanisms often involve distortion of reality, considered psychologically unhealthy.

  • Three defence mechanisms are listed with their definitions.
• Defence mechanisms

  • Repression

  Forcing a distressing memory out of the conscious mind.

  • Denial

  Refusing to acknowledge some aspect of reality.

  • Displacement

  Transferring feelings from true source of distressing emotion onto a substitute target.
• • A strength of the psychodynamic approach is that it led to the development of a new form of therapy: Psychoanalysis.
  • Psychoanalysis uses a range of techniques designed to access the unconscious, such as hypnosis and dream analysis.
  • De Maat et al’s large scale review of psychotherapy studies concluded that psychoanalysis produced significant improvements in symptoms.
  • This suggests that the psychodynamic approach has been important in finding successful treatments for a range of disorders.
• • One limitation of the psychodynamic approach is that it cannot be scientifically tested or disproved (falsified).
  • Many of Freud’s concepts, such as the id, occur at the unconscious level.
  • This makes them difficult, if not impossible, to test.
  • According to Popper, this means psychodynamic theory is a pseudoscience (fake science) rather than real science.
• • One strength of the psychodynamic approach is that the claims of psychoanalysis have been tested and many of them have been confirmed using scientific methodology. 
  • In their summary of 2,500 studies, Fisher and Greenberg concluded that experimental studies of psychoanalysis ‘compare well with studies relevant to any other major area of psychology’
  • This suggests that there is scientific support for the psychoanalytic approach.
• • One limitation of the psychodynamic approach is that of gender bias.
  • Freud’s views of women and female sexuality were less well developed than his views on male sexuality
  • Dismissing women and their sexuality is problematic because Freud’s theories are still so influential today.
  • Therefore, it would make sense for them to explain female behaviour fully.