Psychodynamic Approach in Psychology (2023)

Importance of the unconscious mind

The unconscious mind comprises mental processes inaccessible to consciousness that influence judgment, feelings, or behavior (Wilson, 2002).

According to the psychodynamic approach, the unconscious is the part of the mind which contains things we are unaware of, such as feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories.

According to Freud (1915), the unconscious mind is the primary source of human behavior. Like an iceberg, the most important part of the mind is the part you cannot see. Our feelings, motives, and decisions are powerfully influenced by past experiences and stored in the unconscious.

Most of the content of theunconsciousis unacceptable or unpleasant and could cause feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict if it became conscious.

For example, hysteria is an example of a physical symptom that has no physical cause though the ailment is just as real as if it had, but rather is caused by some underlying unconscious problem.

The unconscious is seen as a vital part of the individual. It is irrational, emotional, and has no concept of reality which is why its attempts to leak out must be inhibited.

The role of the unconscious mind is to protect the ego from this content. However, according to Freud, the content of the unconscious motivates our feelings, motives, and decisions.

Importance of early experience

Our behavior and feelings as adults (including psychological problems) are rooted in our childhood experiences.

The psychodynamic theory states that events in our childhood have a significant influence on our adult lives, shaping our personality.

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

Freud’s theory of psychosexual stages of development predicated that childhood experiences create the adult personality. Events that occur in childhood can remain in the unconscious and cause problems as adults, such as mental illness.

Psychic determinism

Psychodynamic theory is strongly determinist as it views our behavior as entirely caused by unconscious emotional drives over which we have no control.

Unconscious thoughts and feelings can transfer to the conscious mind through parapraxes, popularly known as Freudian slips or slips of the tongue. We reveal what is really on our minds by saying something we didn’t mean to.

Freud believed that slips of the tongue provided an insight into the unconscious mind and that there were no accidents, every behavior (including slips of the tongue) was significant (i.e., all behavior is determined).

Behavior can be explained in terms of the inner conflicts of the mind

Personality comprises three parts (i.e., tripartite): the id, ego, and super-ego. Parts of the unconscious mind (the id and superego) are in constant conflict with the conscious part of the mind (the ego).

• 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 (which contains the libido), and the aggressive (death) instinct – Thanatos.
• The ego develops to mediate between the unrealistic id and the external real world. It is the decision-making component of personality.
• The superego incorporates society’s values and morals, which are learned from one’s parents and others. It has two components: the ego ideal, which sets the standards, and the conscience, which produces guilt.

When unconscious conflicts between the id and the superego cannot be resolved by the ego, they create anxiety. To reduce this anxiety, we use defense mechanisms such as repression.

To be mentally healthy, the ego has to be able to balance the demands of the ego and the superego. If the superego is dominant, the individual might develop a neurosis e.g., depression. If the id is dominant, the individual might develop a psychosis e.g., schizophrenia.

According to the psychodynamic approach, the resolution of the problem would be achieved by the therapist assisting the client to delve back into their childhood and identify when the problem arose.

Having identified the problem this can be brought into the conscious where the imbalance can be resolved, returning equanimity between the id, ego, and superego.

Consequently, the defense mechanisms will only operate at the maintenance level and the mental illness will be cured.

Historical Timeline

• Anna O a patient of Dr. Joseph Breuer (Freud’s mentor and friend) from 1800 to 1882 suffered from hysteria.
• In 1895 Breuer and his assistant, Sigmund Freud, wrote a book, Studies on Hysteria. In it they explained their theory: Every hysteria is the result of a traumatic experience, one that cannot be integrated into the person’s understanding of the world. The publication establishes Freud as “the father of psychoanalysis.
• By 1896 Freud had found the key to his own system, naming it psychoanalysis . In it, he had replaced hypnosis with “free association.”
• In 1900 Freud published his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams, which established the importance of psychoanalytical movement.
• In 1902 Freud founded the Psychological Wednesday Society, later transformed into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society .
• As the organization grew, Freud established an inner circle of devoted followers, the so-called “Committee” (including Sàndor Ferenczi, and Hanns Sachs (standing) Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, and Ernest Jones).

• Freud and his colleagues came to Massachusetts in 1909 to lecture on their new methods of understanding mental illness. .Those in attendance included some of the country’s most important intellectual figures, such as William James, Franz Boas, and Adolf Meyer.
• In the years following the visit to the United States, the International Psychoanalytic Association was founded. Freud designated Carl Jung as his successor to lead the Association, and chapters were created in major cities in Europe and elsewhere. .
• Regular meetings or congresses were held to discuss the theory, therapy, and cultural applications of the new discipline.
• Carl Jung’s study on schizophrenia, The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, led him into collaboration with Sigmund Freud.
• Jung’s close collaboration with Freud lasted until 1913. Jung had become increasingly critical of Freud’s exclusively sexual definition of libido and incest. The publication of Jung’s Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (known in English as The Psychology of the Unconscious) led to a final break.
• Following his emergence from this period of crisis, Jung developed his own theories systematically under the name of Analytical Psychology. Jung’s concepts of the collective unconscious and the archetypes led him to explore religion in the East and West, myths, alchemy, and later flying saucers.
• Melanie Klein took psychoanalytic thinking in a new direction by recognizing the importance of our earliest childhood experiences in the formation of our adult emotional world. .After becoming a full member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society in 1923, Klein embarks upon her first analysis of a child.
• Extending and developing Sigmund Freud’s ideas, Klein drew on her analysis of children’s play to formulate new concepts such as the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position.
• Alfred Adler (1927) thought that the basic psychological element of neurosis was a sense of inferiority and that individuals suffering with the symptoms of this phenomenon spent their lives trying to overcome the feelings without ever being in touch with reality
• Wilhelm Reich (1933) was a psychoanalyst who developed a number of radical psychoanalytical and physical theories. An apprentice of Freud, he believed that neuroses, as well as physical illnesses such as cancer, derived from a lack of “orgone energy” in the body.
• Anna Freud (Freud’s daughter) became a major force in British psychology, specializing in the application of psychoanalysis to children. Among her best known works are The Ego and the Mechanism of defense (1936).
• Erich Fromm, born in Frankfurt, was educated in Heidelberg and Munich before establishing a private psychotherapy practicein 1925. Fromm began as a disciple ofSigmund Freud, combining his psychological theories with Karl Marx’s social principle.

Free Will vs Determinism

Critical Evaluation

The psychodynamic approach has given rise to one of the first “talking cure”, psychoanalysis, on which many psychological therapies are now based. Psychoanalysis is rarely used now in its original form, but it is still used in a shorter version in some cases.

Psychoanalytic therapy has been seen as appropriate mainly for the neurotic disorders (e.g. anxiety and eating disorders) rather than for the psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. It is also used for depression although its effectiveness in this area is more questionable because of the apathetic nature of the depressive patients.

Bachrach et al., (1991) suggests that psychoanalysis may not be appropriate for patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder in that it may inadvertently increase their tendency to over-interpret events in their life.

One of the very influential concept put forward by Freud is the lasting importance of childhood on later life and development. This has influenced Bowlby’s theory of attachment. John Bowlby (1952) was a psychoanalyst (like Freud) and believed that mental health and behavioral problems could be attributed to early childhood.

The greatest criticism of the psychodynamic approach is that it is unscientific in its analysis of human behavior. Many of the concepts central to Freud’s theories are subjective and as such, difficult to test scientifically.

For example, how can scientifically study concepts like the unconscious mind or the tripartite personality? In this respect, it could be argued that the psychodynamic perspective is unfalsifiable as its theories cannot be empirically investigated.

However, cognitive psychology has identified unconscious processes, such as procedural memory (Tulving, 1972), automatic processing (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Stroop, 1935), and social psychology have shown the importance of implicit processing (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Such empirical findings have demonstrated the role of unconscious processes in human behavior.

The concepts of id, ego and superego are very abstract and difficult to test experimentally, so evidence is obtained from case studies (Little Hans, and Anna O). However, the sample used in these case studies is mainly Austrian, so lacks population validity.

Kline (1989) argues that psychodynamic theory comprises a series of hypotheses, some more easily tested than others and some with more supporting evidence than others. Also, while the theories of the psychodynamic approach may not be easily tested, this does not mean that it does not have strong explanatory power.

The main problem here is that the case studies are based on studying one person in detail, and concerning Freud, the individuals in question are most often middle-aged women from Vienna (i.e., his patients). This makes generalizations to the wider population (e.g., the whole world) difficult.

Another problem with the case study method is that it is susceptible to researcher bias. Reexamination of Freud’s own clinical work suggests that he sometimes distorted his patients” case histories to “fit” with his theory (Sulloway, 1991).

The humanistic approach criticizes that the psychodynamic perspective is too deterministic. Freud suggests that all thoughts, behaviors, and emotions are determined by our childhood experiences and unconscious mental processes. This is a weakness because it suggests we have no conscious free will over our behavior, leaving little room for the idea of personal agency (i.e., free will).

The individual is not seen as responsible for their disorders however as the conflicts which lead to the disorder are unconscious there is nothing they can do about it without an analyst, they are disempowered.

The psychodynamic approach can be criticized for being sexist against women. For example, Freud believed that females” penis envy made them inferior to males. He also thought that females tended to develop weaker superegos and more prone to anxiety than males.

Finally, it cannot explain the biological symptoms observed in some disorders such as enlarged ventricles in schizophrenics.

References

Adler, A., Jelliffe, S. Ely. (1917). Study of Organ Inferiority and its Psychical Compensation: A Contribution to Clinical Medicine. New York: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company.

Adler, A. (1927). Understanding human nature. New York: Greenburg.

Bachrach, H. M., Galatzer-Levy, R., Skolnikoff, A., & Waldron Jr, S. (1991). On the efficacy of psychoanalysis.Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association,39(4), 871-916.

Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American psychologist, 54(7), 462.

Bowlby, J. (1952). Maternal care and mental health.Journal of Consulting Psychology, 16(3), 232.

Erikson, E. H. (1950). Childhood and society. New York: Norton.

Freud, A. (1936). Ego & the mechanisms of defense.

Freud, S., & Breuer. J. (1895). Studies on hysteria. In Standard edition (Vol. 2, pp. 1–335).

Freud, S. (1896). Heredity and the etiology of the neuroses. In Standard edition (Vol. 3, pp. 142–156).

Freud, S. (1900). The interpretation of dreams. In Standard edition (Vols. 4 & 5, pp. 1–627).

Freud, S. (1909). Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis. In Standard edition (Vol. 10, pp. 153–249).

Freud, S. (1909). Analysis of a phobia of a five year old boy. In The Pelican Freud Library (1977), Vol 8, Case Histories 1, pages 169-306.

Freud, S. (1915). The unconscious. SE, 14: 159-204.

Freud, A. (1936). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. International Universities Press, Inc.

Fromm, E. (1959). Psychoanalysis and Zen buddhism.Psychologia, 2(2), 79-99.

Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (1995). Implicit social cognition: attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes. Psychological review, 102(1), 4.

Jung, C. G. (1907). Ueber die Psychologie der Dementia praecox. Psychological Bulletin, 4(6), 196-197.

Jung, C. G. (1912). Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido: Beiträge zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Denkens. F. Deuticke.

Jung, C. G., et al. (1964). Man and his Symbols, New York, N.Y.: Anchor Books, Doubleday.

Kline, P. (1989). Objective tests of Freud’s theories. Psychology Survey, 7, 127-45.

Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of experimental psychology, 18(6), 643.

Sulloway, F. J. (1991). Reassessing Freud’s case histories: The social construction of psychoanalysis. Isis, 82(2), 245-275.

Tulving, E. (1972). Episodic and semantic memory. In E. Tulving & W. Donaldson (Eds.), Organization of Memory, (pp. 381–403). New York: Academic Press.

Reich, W. (1933). On character analysis. The Psychoanalytic Review (1913-1957), 20, 89.

Wilson, T. D. (2004). Strangers to ourselves. Harvard University Press.

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