Psychodynamic Approach
| For this section you need to be able to:
a Define the psychodynamic approach showing understanding that it is about the influence of unconscious processes on behaviour, and the importance of early childhood. b Define and use psychological terminology accurately and appropriately including: |
The psychodynamic approach was originally developed by Sigmund Freud but includes ideas from many other people who have developed Freud’s arguments.
The main assumption of the psychodynamic approach is that all behaviour can be explained in terms of the inner conflicts of the mind. For example, in the case study of Little Hans, Freud argued that Little Hans’ phobia of horses was caused by a displaced fear of his father.
The psychodynamic approach emphasises the role of the unconscious mind, the structure of personality and the influence that childhood experiences have on later life.
Freud believed that the unconscious mind determines much of our behaviour and that we are motivated by unconscious emotional drives. Freud believed that the unconscious contains unresolved conflicts and has a powerful effect on our behaviour and experience. He argued that many of these conflicts will show up in our fantasies and dreams, but the conflicts are so threatening that they appear in disguised forms, in the shape of symbols.
Freud proposed that the adult personality has three parts the id, ego and superego. The id is the combination of pleasure seeking desires and we are born with it. The ego develops later and it controls the desires of the id. The superego is the moralistic part of personality which develops as a child interacts with significant others such as its parents. The superego can be seen as the conscience. It is the role of the ego to maintain a balance between the id and the superego.
According to Freud, the mind can be seen as being similar to an iceberg with only the very tip being exposed and the bulk of the ice berg being unseen. The id is completely in the unconscious (beneath the sea) and the ego and super ego operate at conscious, pre-conscious and unconscious levels. Information that is painful, anxiety producing or threatening is pushed into and contained in the unconscious mind. Other information that can be brought to consciousness is contained in the pre-conscious level. Our consciousness is what is currently in our minds.
The conscious contains information that we are aware of and have easy access to.
The pre conscious holds on to information until it is decided if it is threatening to conscious thought.
The unconscious holds all the information that the conscious cannot deal with. The individual would not be aware of the thoughts that are contained here. They are hidden, and may be potentially destructive and often of a sexual or violent nature.
Freud believed that children pass through five stages of development, known as the psychosexual stages because of Freud’s emphasis on sexuality as the basic drive in development. These stages are: the oral stage, the anal stage, the phallic stage, the latency period and finally the genital stage.
Oral stage – from birth until approximately 15 months. The focus of pleasure is on the mouth.
Anal stage – from approximately 15 months to 3 years of age. Children gain pleasure from retaining or expelling faeces.
Phallic stage – from approximately 3 years to 5 years of age. The focus of a child’s pleasure is on their genitals. This stage of development is the most relevant to this study as this is when a boy experiences the Oedipus complex.
Latency stage – from approximately 5 years to puberty. Sexual drives are repressed.
Genital stage – from puberty onwards. The focus of sexual pleasure is again the genitals but this time shown through relationships with members of the opposite sex.
The phallic stage, from three to five years old was the stage where the child’s sexual identification was established. During this stage Freud hypothesised that a young boy would experience what he called the Oedipus complex. This would provide the child with highly disturbing conflicts, which had to be resolved by the child identifying with the same-sexed parent.
Freud thought that, during the phallic stage, the young boy develops an intense sexual love for his mother. Because of this, he sees his father as a rival, and wants to get rid of him. The father, however, is far bigger and more powerful than the young boy, and so the child develops a fear that, seeing him as a rival, his father will castrate him. Because it is impossible to live with the continual castration-threat anxiety provided by this conflict, the young boy develops a mechanism for coping with it, using a defence mechanism known as ‘identification with the aggressor’. He stresses all the ways that he is similar to his father, adopting his father’s attitudes, mannerisms and actions, feeling that if his father sees him as similar, he will not feel hostile towards him.
Defence mechanisms are strategies that are used to protect the ego (our rational conscious mind) from an imaginary threat. Although all defence mechanisms can distort reality, according to Freud we all use some of them at some time as they are a way of avoiding unwanted information ourselves or the outside world.
Repression is an example of a defence mechanism and occurs when an individual keeps anxiety proving thoughts out of their conscious awareness possibly as of way of coping.