Psychology - The Psychodynamic Approach

[NOTE: This article is not written by me, but by a friend]

The key assumption of the Psychodynamic Approach is that all behaviour and functions are driven by the interactions of drives and forces inside a person’s mind, between different structures of their personality.

The approach is based on Sigmund Freud’s theories and those of his followers. Freud claimed that whenever we make a choice or decision, there are hidden mental processes that govern them. His concept of the human psyche was that there were three levels of conscious and three main mental processes (or structures of personality). Freud’s ideas were clinically derived i.e. based on the information he gathered from patients in therapy.

THE LEVELS OF CONSCIOUS

• The conscious - what we are aware of now.
• The preconscious - thoughts that are able to become conscious through recognition, and recall. Things that you can easily retrieve e.g. phone numbers – are things that you would not have been aware of until they were raised there, but you can easily raise it into your conscious and remember it. Then they will pass out of consciousness again.
• The unconscious - instincts, drives and desires that have a strong influence on behaviour that we are not aware of. The unconscious also contains memories from our early childhood, before we had language for these memories. Some of them may traumatic or upsetting, and are kept in the unconscious through the defence mechanism of repression, to prevent them from causing mental disturbance.

Given the assumption that most of our behaviour is unconscious, the approach would suggest that humans are irrational and have their behaviour pre-determined by these unconscious processes.

THE STRUCTURES OF PERSONALITY

In Freud’s psychoanalysis the personality, or psyche, is governed by three main mental processes: innate drives, reason, and morality. The three processes are present in different levels of conscious, as shown in the Iceberg Metaphor to the right. They are named as follows:

• THE ID (Innate Drives): This is only present in the unconscious and is the sources of all our desires and impulses, and is very selfish and works on the pleasure principle, and so is only concerned with gratifying its desires. For example when Bob is hungry his Id wants the hunger satisfied.
• THE EGO (Reason): This is formed at around the age of two, and works on the reality principle. It's concerned with keeping us reasonable and logical, and connects the Id to reality. I.e. when Bob is hungry and his Id wants the hunger satisfied, his Ego says he has to go across the room to get a sandwich.
• THE SUPER-EGO (Morality): This forms around the age of 5/6 and contains our morals, and regulates our thoughts and actions based on our moral principles. Back to Bob, although he has realised he needs to go across the room to get the sandwich, his Super-ego tells him he shouldn't, because it's someone else's sandwich.

This means that conflict exists between the pleasure principle and reality principle. Our Id wants instant gratification for its aggressive and/or erotic desires, whether or not they are realistic or socially acceptable. The Ego realises that they may not be feasible and tries to channel them into socially acceptable ways, while the Super-ego tries to block many of these desires completely as they may be morally wrong.

PSYCHOSEXUAL DEVELOPMENT

Freud believed that our personality develops in stages during our early childhood, which he called psychosexual stages (with interesting names!). Each is characterised by different demands for gratification (controlled by the Id), and the different ways in which they are met (governed by the Ego and Super-ego). If we meet the inadequate amount of gratification, either too little or too much, then we may become fixated on a particular stage. Freud believed these fixations may be the cause of personality issues which may be expressed later in life.

Oral Stage

This stage starts around 0-1 years, and this when a child's Id draws pleasure from sucking and later chewing. Freud believed that the way a child is breast-fed and/or bottle-fed and then weaned is of major importance. Any disturbance may lead to fixation on the oral stage, which can be portrayed through chewing pencils, over-eating, thumb-sucking and smoking.

The personality issues related to this fixation, include impatience, passivity, greed, and issues with sharing. An oral-dependent personality is passive and enjoys taking more than giving. An oral-aggressive personality is hostile, vocal and exploitative.

Anal Stage

This stage starts around 1-3 years. When a child is toilet trained and experiences expelling faeces, it faces external restrictions on its wish to expel faeces whenever and wherever it wants. This is a crucial point as a child learns to earn the love and approval of its parents, because he/she realises love is no longer unconditional, and now depends on what the child does. Both the extremes of expelling and retaining faeces can lead to fixation and related traits in adulthood.

The anal retentive personality may show excessive self-control, stinginess, extreme cleanliness, rigidity and hatred of waste. The anal expulsive personality may imply a sloppy lifestyle, messy behaviour, a hot-temper or destructiveness.

Phallic Stage

This stage starts around 3-6 years. Sensitivity is now concentrated in the genitals, and stimulating the genitals becomes a new source of gratification for the Id. The child also becomes aware of bodily genital differences, which sets in place conflicting emotions  which Freud called the Oedipus complex (for boys) and the Electra complex (for girls) which give a child a gender identity (not the misconception of popular culture: killing your father and taking your mother to bed). People with fixations at this stage can be vain, narcissistic and exhibitionistic.

The Oedipus complex and Castration Anxiety

Freud stated that boys want their mothers affection, but see their father as a rival for this affection. They become scared of their father given that he is bigger and more powerful than them. The fear is that the father will castrate them as punishment, which causes castration anxiety.

The fear of castration makes boys anxious, and the child believes the father hates him. Freud concluded that these emotions become unbearable, and so he renounces his feelings for the mother and identifies with the father.

The Electra Complex

Freud stated that girls want their fathers affection after realising they don’t have a penis, and so they develop 'penis envy'. This realisation alongside the knowledge that their mother doesn’t have a penis leads the girls to become attracted to her father. Like with the Oedipus complex, Freud said girls believe the mother suspects these feelings, and that they will hate them for it. So, girls then renounce their feelings for their father and identify with the mother.

The Oedipus and the Electra complexes are essentially Freud's explanation for where children get their gender identity from. I.e. why they see their respective parents as role models, and why they tend to behave like them.

Freud's main evidence for the Oedipus and the Electra complexes comes from his Case Study of a Five Year Old Boy. [Warning: Weird!]

Latent Stage

When the child has started school at 6 years, its sexuality becomes suppressed, or latent. This is because the child expands its interests and friends, which are important to a healthy development.

Genital Stage

As puberty starts, the child has a renewed interest in stimulation of the genitals, and sexual energy is focused outwards and onwards on the peer group of the opposite sex.

Criticisms of Psychosexual Development

Understandably, many of Freud's views and ideas were not readily accepted. Over the years many of his theories have been modified so the are less specific and are more approachable (for wont of a better word).

Brown and Pedder (1991) argued that oral, anal and phallic were too narrow to describe what occurs. They suggested that we should think of:

• The oral stage as a stage of complete dependency on the caregiver
• The anal stage as a period of separation from the caregiver
• The phallic stage as a time of passionate emotions in which rivalry may form between the child and the same sex parent for the affection of the opposite sex

These concepts - dependency, separation and rivalry - are extremely useful in understanding the developing relationship between a child and its parents (and probably taken a lot more seriously!).

In addition, these theories are commonly criticised or modified as sexist. An example of this is Freud’s belief that girls develop penis envy. In response Karen Horney, a German Freudian psychoanalyst, stated that young female develop 'power envy' instead of 'penis envy' towards the male.

 DEFENCE MECHANISMS

These are employed by the ego to deal with situations where there are conflicts between the Id and the Ego. In short, they are used when we find it difficult to deal with reality or when reality prevents some of our desires.

• DENIAL: Reducing anxiety producing stimuli by refusing to accept unpleasant aspects of reality.
• DISPLACEMENT: Taking out your impulses on a less threatening target. For example, you may become highly aggressive after a colleague aggravates you, and your Id wants to be physically violent against them, but your Super-ego tells you that you cannot be violent, and so your Ego has you punch a less threatening target e.g. a desk or a wall.
• PROJECTION: Placing your unacceptable desires in yourself onto someone else.
• RATIONALISATION OR INTELLECTUALISATION: Remove the emotional content of an idea/event by logical analysis. E.g. saying 'it would never have worked' after a relationship breaks up.
• REGRESSION: Returning to a previous stage of development. For example, you may start sucking your thumb as you might have done in the oral stage of development.
• REPRESSION: Pulling into the unconscious. This is what happens with early childhood memories which may be traumatic, and so they do not cause disturbance, and this may happen with other traumatic memories. These can hypothetically be recovered, but it is difficult and may cause a false memory to be produced.
• SUBLIMINATION: Acting out unacceptable impulses in a socially acceptable way. For example, someone may have strong sexual desires, and so they do intense activities e.g. vigorous exercise.
• REACTION FORMATION: Behaving in ways directly opposite to unconscious impulses and feelings. An example of this is homophobia. In an experiment, people who described themselves as homophobic, where shown to have homosexual desires when shown erotic images of man and women.
• SUPPRESSION: A conscious attempt to avoid thinking about things.
• IDENTIFICATION: Behaving in a similar ways as a person you look up to as a role model.

THERAPY

In Psychodynamic therapy, the aim is to alleviate repressed thoughts, emotions and ideas. This is because some of them may be traumatic and upsetting, and manifest themselves as disturbances such as depression, anxiety etc.

Free Association

This is the method that Freud created and used as an alternative to hypnosis. This is where a series of words are read out and the patient says whatever comes to mind first. The idea of this is to try to project and piece together fragments of memories and ideas that have been repressed. The client also may talk about their childhood memories, ideas, fantasies etc. whilst the therapist records and analyses them. Occasionally Freud’s patients would have such vivid and realistic recall of memories they would almost relive them, and this could create a cathartic (i.e. healing) experience that would help the client.

However, this can be a lengthy process due to the nature of defence mechanisms, and may take several sessions a week for many years to fully complete.

PROJECTING THE UNCONSCIOUS

Projecting the unconscious allows therapists and researchers to see what is inside the unconscious. It is when snippets of thoughts or ideas in the unconscious 'escape' and manifest in the conscious. These can be used to help identify abnormalities in a person's personality. Examples of this are:

Dream Analysis

Dreams come from our unconscious and usually originate, as Freud believed, from our early childhood conflicts. He saw them as the ‘royal road to the unconscious'. He believed that by interpreting the dream, you can find out what is in a person’s unconscious. His book The Interpretation Of Dreams revolutionised the study of dreams. He claimed that because the Super-ego’s guards are down when we are unconscious, our Id can present its desires to us. Many of these desires can be disturbing and even traumatic, so the mind has to use a psychological 'censor' to translate the disturbing content into a more acceptable form. This helps you remain sleeping and prevents you from being shocked at the images. The reason you cannot remember dreams easily is because your Super-ego is trying to protect the conscious mind from these images.

Rorschach Ink Blots

The Ink Blot test is a common test used in psychoanalysis. It is a projective test. This is where something ambiguous is presented to the patient and they are asked to describe what they perceive. It is believed that the ambiguity causes the unconscious to project ideas so that the conscious mind can form a description of the ambiguous object (in this case, an inkblot). The result is then recorded and analysed, and conclusions may be drawn from the results. For example, a person who consistently sees threatening images may have paranoia.

Freudian Slips

Unconscious thoughts and feelings can transfer to the conscious mind in the form of parapraxes, also known as 'Freudian slips' or slips of the tongue. We reveal what is really on our mind by saying something we didn’t mean to, and so provide an insight into the unconscious.

For example, a nutritionist giving a lecture intended to say “We should always demand the best in bread”, but instead said “bed”. Another example is where a person may call their (or someone else's) new partner by the name of a previous one, whom they liked better.

EVALUATION

Freud's Psychodynamic Approach has a lot to say on a variety of topics. Even though it reduces human behaviour to impulses that are controlled by unconscious forces, it still has great explanatory power. It is also provides an explanation for the link between childhood experiences and adult personality.

Any personality theory since Freud's work can be seen as a reaction to or an aspect of the Psychodynamic Approach. Freud also created a new way of dealing with old age mental disorders, and many still believe it is the best way to understand and treat neuroses.

However, the approach is theoretically unscientific as it is incapable of being proved - right or wrong. It also does not use scientific study methods, nor does it have reliable empirical research to support its theories. Scientific research demands quantitative data and this is simply not possible for many of the theories of the approach. For example, how do you quantify the Oedipus complex? So far, none of the attempts to experimentally prove the Psychodynamic Approach have been successful.

Furthermore, many people may not want to think of themselves as slavering, unconsciously sex-driven beings with constant conflict in our minds, as this is a pessimistic view and somewhat depressing of the human mind.

However, Freud revolutionised psychology, due the great amount of research stimulated by his ideas. The ideas of those who supported him, and of those who opposed him, have led to a large amount of progress. Without them, Psychology as we know it today would not exist.

KRISTIAN SMITH