Psychoanalytic and Humanistic Perspectives

Features of the Psychoanalytic and Humanistic Perspectives

Outline the key features of the psychoanalytic and humanistic

perspectives, and briefly compare and contrast their views on

conscious experience, a person as an integrated whole, and the role of

therapists in arriving at changes.

Answer

In explaining and predicting animal behaviour, different schools of

psychology are of different perspectives; e.g. cognitive approach

focuses on the mental processes, behaviourism is based on external

stimuli and reinforcement, biological approach is concerned with the

relationship between the mind and body and the influence of heredity.

However, they are only cope with a specific part of people, but

neglect human as a whole. To supplement such deficient, both

psychoanalytic and humanistic psychologies have provided their

perspectives on it.

Psychoanalytic Perspective

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Psychoanalytic approach was advocated by Sigmund Freud, a private

practitioner who construct his theory through therapy and

self-experience. In his theory, there are three major ideas; they are

consciousness, psychosexual stages of development and psychodynamics

as well.

Freud split the consciousness into three levels; they are conscious,

preconscious and unconscious respectively. The conscious level

contains information of which we are aware, alert and awake at the

moment, e.g. you can easily answer the question of “What is your

name?”. The preconscious level contains the memories and thoughts

that are easily remember through a little effort, e.g. in respond to a

question of “Where are you last night?”. The unconsciou...

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...ents are equal and fair. They only encourage

their clients to express their feelings and believe that they could

solve their problems by themselves.

Even though the psychoanalytic approach was criticized as unobservable

and the humanism is over emphasis the ability of individual, but

neglect the external factors, e.g. environmental and cultural

influences; they indeed made contributions to help people to tackle

their psychic/psychological problems.

(1,616 words)

Reference

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The Open University of HK (OUHK) (2003).

SS101. Hong Kong : OUHK

Miell, D., Phoenix, A., and Thomas, K. (2002).

Mapping Psychology 2. Milton Keynes : The Open University Press

Davis, S.F. and Palladino, J.J. (1995)

Psychology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice Hall

Website : http://www.webref.org