The Psychodynamic approach

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The Psychodynamic Approach

Assumes that adult behaviour reflects interactions between conscious and unconscious behaviour and the significance of early development.

All psychodynamic approaches have origins from the pioneering work of Sigmund freud.

The Structure of Personality

The id: operates on the pleasure principle and constantly aims to act on these natural instincts through sex or other pleasurable activities but it may lead to aggression.

The ego: represents our conscious self, develops during early childhood. Aims to balance id and superego. Operates on the reality principle.

The superego: our personal moral conscience, develops later in childhood through identification with a parent at which point it internalises the moral norms and social rules of society.

Defence mechanisms

Repression: threatening impulses are repressed into the unconscious, they do not disappear but the individual is unaware of them. Eventually symptoms of anxiety can arise.

Displacement: when an unacceptable drive such as hatred is displaced from its primary target to a more acceptable one.

Denial: when an individual refuses to accept that an event has happened.

Psychosexual development

Oral: From birth to 18 months;

id impulses are satisfied by feeding, sucking & biting. Fixation at this stage can result in excessive smoking/drinking in adult life.

Anal: From 18 months to 3 years old;

key activities involve retaining and expelling faeces, the child can exert some control over itself. Fixation at this stage may lead to obsessive cleanliness

Phallic: From 3-5 years old;

Genital stimulation, the most important part is the oedipus complex. Where boys experience intense affection and desire for the mother viewing their father as a rival, this in turn produces a fear of losing his fathers love. To cope with these conflicting feelings the boy identifies with his father, internalising his fathers moral attitudes forming the basis of the superego.

^^^ heavily phallocentric the equivalent for girls lacks detail and is almost an afterthought.

Evaluation

+ The first approach to emphasise the significance of unconscious processes (now widely accepted)

+ First to suggest how our adult behaviour could be affected by our early childhood behaviour

- Infantile sexuality was overemphasised to the exclusion of other aspects of development.

- Did not study children directly, largely based his theories of adult case studies.

- The fundamental concepts are impossible to test.

- The theory of abnormal/normal behaviour was developed in the late 19th century.