Examples Of Psychodynamic Approach

PSYCHOANALYTIC APPROACH

The psychoanalytic school of thought originated in the 1890’s and was founded by Sigmund Freud. The thinking behind this school of thought is to understand a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviours by delving into a person’s unconscious examining their early childhood experiences. A psychotherapist helps the patient to work through issues they may have by probing into their unconsciousness and helping them to become aware of how their unconscious drives their behaviours.

Freud believed that our personality was made up of three parts; id, ego, and superego. The id is described as our unconscious, this is present from birth and operates on our pleasure principle. Ego is our conscious and begins to develop around about

Watson felt that previous studies of psychology had been unscientific and therefore unmeasurable. Behaviourism has an emphasis on learning, there were different types of learning, classical conditioning, learning by association, where there is a stimulus-response to environmental factors. Operant conditioning, where by an animal learns by positive and negative reinforcement which shape the animal’s behaviour. Each of these ideas have been extensively studied by carrying out many hours of experiments in controlled environments and the findings recorded and compared which gives in turn supports the theories with empirical data.

Some psychoanalysts criticise behaviourism as it ignores the importance of relationships and families in the learning process and that we would learn anyway as we are biologically programmed to learn how to survive, it is also seen as deterministic as behaviourism states that it is only our environment that shapes out behaviour and personal choice or free will plays no

The cognitive school of thought places importance on our higher-level mental processes and why we think feel and behave the way we do. The cognitive approach looks at how we take in information from the world around us and how we process this information and how we respond to our environment around us. The thinking behind the cognitive approach was helped by the development of computer engineering and further investigations by Edward Tolman that said that animals do something with stimulus and response, that we are active processors of information and not passive learners as behaviourists had previously suggested. Tolman was able to look further into previous experiments and was able to infer that learned behaviours could be refined to become more sophisticated than earlier believed.

The limitations of cognitive theory stem from some people believing the computer analogy of being too mechanistic and over simplistic, that computers are too logical and unemotional, whereas humans are not logical, make mistakes and ruled by emotions, another reason cognitive theory is questioned is due to the fact that a lot of the psychology comes from experiments done under laboratory conditions which although measured are unrealistic to in relation to