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Advantages
- Acknowledges importance of childhood experiences in determining personality
- Offers causal explanations for underlying atypical conditions
- Freud's psychodynamic methods are still used in psychiatry
- Freud's theories are unfalsifiable
- Treats the whole person, not just the problem
- Made case studies popular in psychology
- Applied in gender role development, moral development, treating aggression and dream analysis
- Highlighted the importance of the unconscious mind
- Huge impact on Western thought and literature
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Disadvantages
- Freud's theories are unfalsifiable- unscientific
- Case studies lack generalisability, especially as many done by Freud were of middle-aged women from Vienna
- The idea that infants display sexual urges has been criticised
- Freud's theories are male-oriented
- Rejects free will (Humanistic psychologists disagree)
- Ignores mediational processes (SLT would argue this matters)
- Psychoanalysis as a therapy has been questioned, considering the number of patients who recover spontaneously from atypical disorders
- The clinical interview method has problems with bias. There are accusations of therapists reconstructing memories by implanting false memories.
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