What are the three major sources of influence on the psychoanalytic movement?

Sigmund Freud (writing between the 1890s and the 1930s) developed a collection of theories which have formed the basis of the psychodynamic approach to psychology.

His theories are clinically derived - i.e., based on what his patients told him during therapy. The psychodynamic therapist would usually be treating the patient for depression or anxiety related disorders.

Basic Assumptions

Our behavior and feelings are powerfully affected by unconscious motives:

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

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 actually powerfully influenced by our past experiences, and stored in the unconscious.

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

Psychodynamic theory 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.

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

All behavior has a cause (usually unconscious), even slips of the tongue. Therefore all behavior is determined:

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

Unconscious thoughts and feelings can transfer to the conscious mind in the form of parapraxes, popularly 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.

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).

Personality is made up of three parts (i.e., tripartite): the id, ego, and super-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 in order to mediate between the unrealistic id and the external real world. It is the decision making component of personality.

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

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

History of Psychodynamic Theory

The History of Psychodynamic Theory

• 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.

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  By The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Last Updated: Dec 10, 2022 Article History

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  psychoanalysis, method of treating mental disorders, shaped by psychoanalytic theory, which emphasizes unconscious mental processes and is sometimes described as “depth psychology.” The psychoanalytic movement originated in the clinical observations and formulations of Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, who coined the term psychoanalysis. During the 1890s, Freud worked with Austrian physician and physiologist Josef Breuer in studies of neurotic patients under hypnosis. Freud and Breuer observed that, when the sources of patients’ ideas and impulses were brought into consciousness during the hypnotic state, the patients showed improvement.

  Observing that most patients talked freely without being under hypnosis, Freud evolved the technique of free association of ideas. The patient was encouraged to say anything that came to mind, without regard to its assumed relevancy or propriety. Noting that patients sometimes had difficulty in making free associations, Freud concluded that certain painful experiences were repressed, or held back from conscious awareness. Freud noted that in the majority of the patients seen during his early practice, the events most frequently repressed were concerned with disturbing sexual experiences. Thus he hypothesized that anxiety was a consequence of the repressed energy (libido) attached to sexuality; the repressed energy found expression in various symptoms that served as psychological defense mechanisms. Freud and his followers later extended the concept of anxiety to include feelings of fear, guilt, and shame consequent to fantasies of aggression and hostility and to fear of loneliness caused by separation from a person on whom the sufferer is dependent.

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  Sigmund Freud: Psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud

  Freud’s free-association technique provided him with a tool for studying the meanings of dreams, slips of the tongue, forgetfulness, and other mistakes and errors in everyday life. From these investigations he was led to a new conception of the structure of personality: the id, ego, and superego. The id is the unconscious reservoir of drives and impulses derived from the genetic background and concerned with the preservation and propagation of life. The ego, according to Freud, operates in conscious and preconscious levels of awareness. It is the portion of the personality concerned with the tasks of reality: perception, cognition, and executive actions. In the superego lie the individual’s environmentally derived ideals and values and the mores of family and society; the superego serves as a censor on the ego functions.

  In the Freudian framework, conflicts among the three structures of the personality are repressed and lead to the arousal of anxiety. The person is protected from experiencing anxiety directly by the development of defense mechanisms, which are learned through family and cultural influences. These mechanisms become pathological when they inhibit pursuit of the satisfactions of living in a society. The existence of these patterns of adaptation or mechanisms of defense are quantitatively but not qualitatively different in the psychotic and neurotic states.

  Freud held that the patient’s emotional attachment to the analyst represented a transference of the patient’s relationship to parents or important parental figures. Freud held that those strong feelings, unconsciously projected to the analyst, influenced the patient’s capacity to make free associations. By objectively treating these responses and the resistances they evoked and by bringing the patient to analyze the origin of those feelings, Freud concluded that the analysis of the transference and the patient’s resistance to its analysis were the keystones of psychoanalytic therapy.

  Early schisms over such issues as the basic role that Freud ascribed to biological instinctual processes caused onetime associates Carl Jung, Otto Rank, and Alfred Adler to establish their own psychological theories. Other influential theorists, including some who introduced significant departures from Freudian theory or technique, included Melanie Klein, Karen Horney, Ronald Fairbairn, Harry Stack Sullivan, Donald Winnicott, Erich Fromm, Erik Erikson, and Heinz Kohut. At one time psychiatrists held a monopoly on psychoanalytic practice, but later nonmedical therapists also were admitted to psychoanalytic training institutes.

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  Later developments included work on the technique and theory of psychoanalysis of children, pioneered by Klein and Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud’s daughter. The Freudian tripartite division of the mind into id, ego, and superego became progressively more elaborate, problems of anxiety received increasing attention, and explorations of female sexuality were undertaken. Psychoanalysis also found many extraclinical applications in other areas of social thought, particularly anthropology and sociology, and in literature and the arts.

  What are the three 3 types of psychoanalytic theory?

  Psychoanalytic theory divides the psyche into three functions: the id—unconscious source of primitive sexual, dependency, and aggressive impulses; the superego—subconsciously interjects societal mores, setting standards to live by; and the ego—represents a sense of self and mediates between realities of the moment and ...

  What are the 3 areas of the mind that the psychoanalysis focused?

  The Id, Ego, and Superego Freud believed that an individual's personality had three components: the id, the ego, and the superego.