Psychodynamic perspective

Question 1

What is the Psychodynamic perspective?

Answer 1

It states that events in our childhood have a great influence on our adult lives, shaping our personality. Events that occur in childhood can remain in the unconscious, and cause problems as adults

Question 2

Who is the psychodynamic theory mainly associated with?

Answer 2

Sigmund Freud

Question 3

What does the Psychodynamic perspective believe about personality

Answer 3

• Personality is shaped as the drives are modified by different conflicts at different times in childhood (during psychosexual development)

Question 4

What are the four assumptions of the psychodynamic perspective

Answer 4

• Adult behaviour is influenced by experiences we had as children
• Our behaviour and feelings are influenced by unconscious motives and conflicts.
• Our personality is an interplay of 3 different forces - the ID (primeval, greedy, self-centred and lustful), ego (the conscious self) and super-ego (moral and judicial side like an internal authoritarian parent)
• Two powerful instinctive drives governing behaviour are Eros (sex drive) and Thanatos (death instinct), both coming from the id.

Question 5

What is the ID?

Answer 5

• The ID is the primitive and instinctive component of personality. It consists of all the inherited (i.e, biological) components of personality present at birth, including the sex (life) instinct - Eros (contains libido), and the aggressive (death) instinct -Thanatos

Question 6

What is the ego?

Answer 6

• The ego develops to mediate between the unrealistic id and the external real world. It is the decision making component of the personality.

Question 7

What is the superego?

Answer 7

• The superego incorporates the values and morals of society which are learned from one’s parents and others.

Question 8

What happens when the unconscious mind is in constant conflict

Answer 8

• Parts of the unconscious mind (id and superego) are in constant conflict with the conscious part of the mind (ego). This conflict creates anxiety which could be dealt with by the ego’s use of defence mechanisms.

Question 9

What is the iceberg metaphor/analogy?

Answer 9

the most important part of the mind is the part you cannot see. Our feelings, motives and decisions are actually powerfully influenced by our past experiences, and stored in the unconscious.

• superego + ID in unconscious

Question 10

What is repression?

Answer 10

• Repression is an unconscious mechanism employed by the ego to keep disturbing and threatening thoughts from becoming conscious.

Question 11

What is an example of repression?

Answer 11

• During the Oedipus complex, aggressive thoughts about the same sex parent are repressed.

Question 12

What is denial?

Answer 12

Denial involves blocking external events from awareness. If some situation is just too much to handle, the person just refuses to experience it.

Question 13

What is an example of denial?

Answer 13

• Smokers may refuse to admit to themselves that smoking is bad for their health.

Question 14

What is a phobia?

Answer 14

• Freud believed that neurotic behaviours, including phobias, are disguised expressions of unconscious conflicts to protect the ego in some way (a way of expressing something that is too traumatising to express openly for some reason)

Question 15

What were the different stages in Freud’s theory of psychosexual development?

Answer 15

Oral Stage (Birth to 1 year) mouth -sucking, swallowing EGO/ID

Anal Stage (1 to 3 years) withholding or expelling faeces

Phallic Stage (3 to 5-6 years) penis or clitoris masturbation SUPEREGO DEVELOPS

Latency Stage (5-6 years to puberty) little or no sexual motivation present

Genital Stage (puberty to adult) penis or vagina - sexual intercourse

Question 16

Give two strengths from the Psychodynamic perspective

Answer 16

1) helps us understand the workings of the unconscious mind, and in this way can explain why individuals behave in ‘odd’ or ‘unusual’ ways sometimes.

c= this is useful as practice apps can be developed such as therapies for phobias to benefit individuals in society
-therapy

2) The perspective considers both innate instincts (Nature) and the environment in the form of parenting (Nurture)

c= This means, the perspective is less reductionist as it looks at more than one aspect of psychological functioning

Question 17

Give two weaknesses of the psychodynamic perspective

Answer 17

1) difficult to assess scientifically due to using constructs to explain behaviour as they are not directly observable and do not exist physically.

c= does not support psych as a science due to difficulty in testing constructs, difficulty in replicating (due to the reliance on case studies) and the collection of qualitative data.

2) The reliance on the case study method (restricted samples) resulting inn small sample sizes and patients who are under psych distress

c= problems generalising the findings to the wider pop who have not had therapy and is less representative