Advantages Of Psychodynamic Approach

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The psychodynamic approach was founded by Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist whom came up with his own theory of how the mind worked which helped lead him towards his idea on the theory of personality. Freud's theory of the mind consisted of the idea that it is split into three parts, the conscious mind, the preconscious mind and the unconscious mind. The conscious contains all the information that a person is paying attention to at any given time, the preconscious contains all the information outside of a person’s attention but readily available if needed and the unconscious contains thoughts, feelings, desires, and memories of which people have no awareness but that influence every aspect of their day-to-day lives. Sigmund Freud proposed …show more content…

A strength of Freud's approach is the fact he acknowledges the importance of childhood experiences in determining adult personality, his ideas also offer causal explanations for underlying atypical psychological conditions, through dream interpretation the unconscious cause of disorder was identified and a cure could be issued by discussing and controlling the desire. Although, Freud's idea of the approach has been accused of having concepts difficult to test and verify scientifically. Another weakness of Sigmund Freud's approach is that it's linked with unsuccessful psychodynamic therapies. One strength of Freud's wish fulfilment theory is the fact that his ideas have had such a large impact on psychology and psychiatry, his theories are still used today, around a 100 years after he first started to develop them. The theory has weaknesses, Freud's controversial idea that infants display sexual urges has received enormous criticism and "manifest" dream content seems to "express" more than it disguises, that is, it seems more understandable than Freud believed. This raises questions about whether dreams are "disguised" attempts at wish …show more content…

The symbol of the wolf, according to Freud, represented the boy’s father and he had a very interesting interpretation of the stillness of the wolves: he suggested it was actually a representation of the opposite, of violent motion. When he was around two years old he had woken up late one afternoon and had seen his parents having sexual intercourse. The violence of the act had terrified him and he claimed that he knew its significance. From then on he was terrified of wolves. Freud eventually cured Wolf Man through psychoanalytic techniques, in particular dream analysis. Thus providing evidence to support psychoanalysis validity as a means for resolving an

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