Psychodynamic

• Any mental illness or disorder is a consequence of early childhood experiences and the breakdown of the ego, causing the ID or the superego to dominate the personality.
• Schizophrenia

  schizophrenia is caused by a schizophrenogenic mother who is cold, dominating and manipulative. She is also poor at communicating with the family which can lead to unresolved issues that can exist at an unconscious level. Secrecy in the household can manifest later as delusions of persecution. A schizophrenogenic mother can result in a weak ego meaning the demands of the ID can’t be controlled leading to a loss of contact with reality.
• Depression

  The superego dominates so an individual will be overwhelmed with feelings of guilt and anger. If they were to satisfy the ID, the superego would punish them with guilt and self criticism. A healthy ego will use defence mechanisms to control the unconscious feelings but a dominating superego can overuse these mechanisms causing depression.
• Evaluation of the psychodynamic explanation:

  • Holistic
  • Deterministic
  • Individual & Situational
  • Nature & Nurture
  • Unscientific
  • Socially Sensitive
  • Ethnocentric
  • Useful
• A strength of the psychodynamic explanation is that it provides practical applications such as psychotherapy to help resolve problems in the unconscious mind. Psychotherapy can help people overcome issues that happened in the past so it improves their quality of life. This is positive as it means people may not need to be dependent on drugs. However, people need to put effort into psychotherapy which makes it time consuming and limits its usefulness .
• A weakness of the psychodynamic explanation is that its ethnocentric as this explanation can’t be generalised across cultures. A schizophrenogenic mother doesn’t exist in all cultures as different cultures have different ideas of how a mother should behave. This is negative as it means explanations can’t be universally applied and thereby may be seen as subjective. However, all cultures agree that a mother should be consistent in her rules with her children which a schizophrenogenic mother isn’t.