Psychodynamic approach

 Sigmund Freud suggested that he part of the mind we are aware of – the conscious
mind is merely the tip of the iceberg.
 Most of our mind is made up of the unconscious mind which is a vast storehouse
that contains our biological drives and instincts, these make up our behaviour and
personality.
 Thanatos (death drive): this is our unconscious drive to die. It is self-destructive
behaviour and is displayed as aggression when directed towards someone.
 Eros (sex drive): based on pleasure, reproduction, survival. It is based on life instincts
that are known as libido.
 The unconscious contains threatening and disturbing memories that are repressed,
forgotten and locked away. These can be accessed through dreams or slips of the
tongue.
 Just bubbling underneath the conscious is the preconscious which contains
memories that are not in conscious awareness but can be accessed if desired.
 The personality is made up of the id, ego and superego
 The id is the primitive part of our personality and works on the pleasure principle.
The id is selfish and demanding, it gets what it wants. Only the id is present at birth.
It requires instant gratification of its needs
 The superego works on the morality principle, it forms at the end of the phallic stage
around age 5. The superego is our internalised sense of right or wrong, it forms
based on the moral standards of our same gender parent and punishes the id for
wrongdoing through guilt
 The ego works on the reality principle, it is the mediator between the other 2 parts
of the personality, it is formed around age 2. The ego reduces conflict between the
selfish demands of the id and superego.
 DEFENCE MECHANSIMS
 Anxiety weakens the ego which is needed to be strong to mediate between the
superego and id, defence mechanisms help reduce levels of anxiety and are
sometimes referred to as ego defence mechanisms.
 Defence mechanisms are used to ensure the ego is not overwhelmed by temporary
threats or traumas.
 However, they cause distortion of reality and as long-term solutions they are
regarded as psychologically unhealthy and undesirable.
 The three types of defence mechanisms are repression, denial and displacement.
 Repression is forcing the distressing memory out of the conscious mind.
 Denial is refusing to acknowledge some aspect of reality.
 Displacement is transferring the feelings from the true source of distressing emotion
onto a substitute target eg eating
 PSYCHOSEXUAL STAGES
 The psychosexual stages are oral, anal, phallic, latent, genital
 There is a build up of libido (sexual energy), and pleasure comes from its discharge
 Each psychosexual stage is focused on a different part of the body.
 Each stage marks its own conflict that the child must resolve in order to progress to
the next stage successfully
 Any psychosexual stage that remains unresolved leads to fixation where the child
becomes stuck and carries certain behaviours and conflicts associatiated with the
stage throughout adult life.
 ORAL 0- 1 YEARS: In the oral stage the focus of pleasure is from the mouth – pleasure
comes from biting and sucking.
 In the mother child relationship, the child can be orally passive or orally aggressive.
 Orally passive – sucking and swallowing – breast feeding.
 Orally aggressive – biting and chewing – starts teething.
 If a child is weaned from their mother’s milk toona early or too late, have irregular
feeding patterns they will become fixated
 Orally passive – dependent, passive, gullible
 Orally aggressive – aggressive, physically, or verbally
 Oral fixation – smoking, biting nails, sarcastic, critical.
 ANAL 1 – 3 YEARS:
 Focus of pleasure is the anus, the child gains pleasure from withholding or expelling
faeces.
 Anally expulsive – child is keen to go to the toilet.
 Anally retentive – strict parents can make child anxious from going to the toilet, so
they hold in their faeces
 Anal expulsive – generous, demonstrative with their emotions, may have fits of
temepers, thoughtless messy
 Anally retentive – perfectionist, neat, obsessive, organsied, reluctant to spend their
money
 PHALLIC 3-6 YEARS:
 Focus of pleasure is the genital area
 Boys experience the Oedipus complex, which is when the child has intense sexual
feelings for their mother and sees their father as a rival for the mothers’ affection,
the boy has negative feelings towards the father and wants him to leave.
 However, the father is much bigger than the boy, so the boy develops a fear that the
father might castrate him, this leads to castration anxiety. Due to the castration
anxiety the boy begins to act like his father and befriends his father. This leads to
identification as the father sees his son as an ally not a rival.
 Phallic personality – narcissistic, reckless
 The phallic stage can only occur if the father is present during his upbringing, if he is
raised by his mother alone the child will grow up to be a homosexual ( no evidence
for this)
 Girls experience the electra complex – penis envy
 Around age 3 girls develop penis envy, they come to the realistation that they do not
have a penis and think it is something that is very important to have. The girls think
that their mother removed their penis.
 Little girls also desire their father and so identify with their mothers in the same way
the boys identifty with their farthest.
 If penis envy is not resolved it can be expressed through the desire to have a bany,
jealousy, ansiety
 Latency – child focuses on being a child, no complexes to resolve. No fixations, earlier
conflicts are repressed.
 Genital – sexual desires become conscious along with the onset of puberty, difficulty
forming heterosexual relationships.
 EVALUATION
 A strength of the psychodynamic approach is that it introduced the use of
psychotherapy instead of the use of physical treatments on mental health issues.
Specifically, Freud introduced psychoanalysis which is used to access thoughts and
feelings in the unconscious mind by techniques such as dream analysis. The thoughts
and feelings that have been repressed into the unconscious mind are brought back
up to the conscious mind so they can be dealt with. Psychoanalysis has also paved
the way for other forms of treatment, such as counselling. This shows that the
psychodynamic approach has allowed us to form new ways of treating mental health
issues in the real world.
 Another strength is support from cases studies. Little Hans experienced the Oedipus
complex (he was fixated in the phallic stage) and had a phobia of horses. He believed
that the horse would come into his house and bite him due to him wishing the horse
would lay down and die (castration anxiety), however, this was Little Hans displacing
his sexual desires for his mother and the fear of his father finding out into horses,
showing that little Hans used a defence mechanism for his fear of his father. This
shows support for the Oedipus complex and defence mechanisms.
 A limitation is that Freud had an underdeveloped view on female sexuality which led
to a gender biased view on male and female morality. The superego develops at the
end of the phallic stage due to identification with the same sex parent. However,
Freud claims that boys identify more strongly with their father (due to castration
anxiety) than girls do with their mother. This shows that females develop weaker
morals so in the real world they may have less access to jobs that require higher
moral thinking, this means that females should not be educated at all. However,
evidence suggests that females may have higher morals then men as males make up
96% of the prison population.
 Another limitation is that people such as popper criticise the psychodynamic
approach for being unscientific. Popper believed that scientific theories should be
established by attempting to falsify them through research. However, Freuds focus
on the unconscious mind eg the Oedipus complex and the id cannot be directly
observed and tested. Moreover, Freuds theories were based on singular subjective
case studies such as little Hans, making it harder to establish universal claims about
human behaviour.