Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory Essay -- Sigmund Freud

Freuds psychoanalytical TheoryI.Overview of Freuds Psychoanalytic TheoryFreuds psychoanalysis is the best known of all constitution theories because it (1) postulated the primacy of sex and aggressiontwo universally popular themes (2) attracted a group of followers who were dedicated to spreading psychoanalytic doctrine and (3) advanced the conceit of unconscious motives, which permit varying explanations for the same observations.II.Biography of Sigmund FreudAlthough he was natural in the Czech Republic in 1856 and died in London in 1939, Sigmund Freud spent n primal 80 years of his emotional state in Vienna. A physician who never intended to practice general medicine, Freud was intensely remarkable ab bulge out human nature, and in his practice of psychiatry he was peradventure more interested in learning about the unconscious motives of his patients than in curing neuroses. Early in his professional career, Freud believed that hysteria was a allow of being seduced during c hildhood by a sexually mature person, very much a parent or other relative. However, in 1897, he flea-bitten his seduction theory and replaced it with his notion of the Oedipus complex. Some recent scholars have contended that Freuds decision to abandon the seduction theory in favor of the Oedipus complex was a major error and influenced a generation of psychotherapists to interpret patients reports of early sexual abuse as merely childhood fantasies.III.Levels of Mental careerFreud saw mental functioning as operating on triad levels the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious.A. UnconsciousThe unconscious consists of drives and instincts that are beyond awareness but that trip many of our behaviors. Unconscious drives dirty dog become conscious only in disguised or distorted form, such as dream images, slips of the tongue, or neurotic symptoms. Unconscious processes originate from two sources (1) repression, or the blocking out of anxiety-filled experiences and (2) phylogenetic endowment, or inherited experiences that lie beyond an individuals personal experience.B. PreconsciousThe preconscious contains images that are not in awareness but that can become conscious either quite easily or with several(prenominal) level of difficulty.C. ConsciousConsciousness is the only level of mental life directly available to us... ...pecially in women. Other research found that volume who are orally fixated tend to see their parents more negatively than do people who are less orally fixated.X.Critique of FreudFreud regarded himself as a scientist, but many present-day critics consider his methods to be outdated, unscientific, and permeated with sexual bias. On the six criteria of a useful theory, we rated psychoanalysis high on its force to generate research, very low on its falsifiability, and average on organizing knowledge, manoeuvre action, and being parsimonious. Because it lacks operational definitions, we rated psychoanalysis low on internal con sistency.XI. opinion of HumanityFreuds view of humanity was deterministic and pessimistic. He overly emphasized causality over teleology, unconscious determinants over conscious processes, and biota over culture, but he took a middle position on the dimension of uniqueness versus similarities among people.BIBLIOGRAPHYPsychCrawler (American Psychological Association)Online.Psychological Online Documents (Psychologisches Institut der Univ. Bonn)Online.PSYCline Links to Psychological Journals (Armin Gnther)Online.