Psychology - Psychodynamic - Summary

Tripartite personality

• Id (pleasure principle), ego (reality principle), superego (conscience and ideal self).

Levels of consciousness 

• Conscious, preconscious and unconscious mind. Unconscious is related to ego defences, e.g. repression, displacement.

Early childhood 

• Young children greatly affected by anxiety, therefore ego defence act. Psychosexual stages have great influence.

Core of personality

• Id, ego, superego managed by strength of ego.

Psychosexual stages 

• Oral, anal, phallic (oedipus conflict or penis envy), latent, genital stages.

Personality types

• Oral aggressive or recepetive, anal retentive or expulsive, phallic and genital characters.

Ego defences

• May lead to mental disorders

Primary-process thought

• Dreams are expression of id thoghts (irrational, instinct-driven) that are unacceptable to the conscious mind.

Wish fulfilment

• Dreams are unconscious fulfilment of wishes denied by the conscious mind.

Dreamwork

• Latent content transformed to manifest through condensation, displacement, representation, symbolism and secondary elaboration.

Strengths 

• Nature and nurture - an interactionist approach.
• Usefulness - importance placed on childhood, value as a therapy and explanations of behaviour.
• Reflects complexity of human behaviour - reductionism prevents true understanding.

Weaknesses 

• Reductionist approach - behaviour simplified to mechanics of id, ego, superego and importance of childhood.
• Determinist approach - behaviour determined  innate forces and childhood.
• Cannot be proved wrong - a 'good' theory should be falsifiable.

An idiographic approach observing one case in detail

• Strengths: true insight because reater time spent with participant, rich qualitative data, emphasises uniquesness of individuals.
• Weaknesses: lacks generalisability, subjective nterpretations, unrepresentative sample.

Clinical interview 

Interviewer starts with fixed questions and then adapts to responses from patient.

• Strengths: facilitates patient/interviewer relationship, therapist can acknowldge non-verbal bahviour, qualitative data.
• Weaknesses: lacks generalisability because qualitative data is hard to summarise, interviewer bias leads to subjective findings