Psychodynamic Theories
Works Cited Not Included
What is it to be human through the lens of psychodynamics? Most
psychodynamic came in the idea from the development of a early life of
childhood, which are in some part of the unconscious. Evolutionists
have recognized that evolutionary psychoanalysis have a big gap
between psychoanalytic theory and the extrospective biological and
social sciences. As for their methods, they observed more closely in
perspective’s contributions and it become very important in
psychodynamic theory to the study of psychology. For psychodynamic
considerations there are four main topics. Reductionism,
falsifiability, universality and retrospective accounts and fallible
memories. As Reductionism is the idea to explain the behaviors of
human reducing the way of explaning the psyche function of
psychodynamic. It is often in literary psychobiographies, which
explains the behavior of some famous person but it cant hurt anyone,
except it might ruin the persons reputation on the subject.
Fasifiability it’s “ theory that is impossible to disconfirm in
principle is not a scientific theory, which you can’t prove it.”
(Tavis & Wade, 2000) This made many of the psychologist theories being
disconfirmed, so they only depends on the popularity of their
proponents than on their content. Universality is what involved with
everyone. An example, “if a gay man goes into therapy for help with
emotional problems, a therapist cannot logically conclude that all gay
men have emotional problems, gay men who are not in therapy would have
to be studied." (Tavis & Wade. 2000) The last topic is the
Retrospective accounts and fallible memories of patients.
Psychodynamic theorists worked in backward that are based on themes in
adult’s recollections of childhood to find the origins of their
emotional problems. "It creates the illusion of causality between the
events." (Tavis & Wade, 2000) As putting together psychodynamic
theories, the tracing of evolution begins from Freud’s and it
influenced on other people like Jung, Horney, Erikson and Adler.

However, Psychodynamic theories are basically the study of human
behavior that includes internal processes, personality, motivation,
drives, and the importance of childhood developments. In the past
theories, the role of unconscious sexual and aggressive drives has
been changed to a conscious experience like the birth of ego-
psychology. The role of focuses in the unconscious and conscious from
Freud and Jung’s theories were the importance change of view in the
past till now. As a most famous psychodynamic theorist is Sigmund
Freud who found the unconscious and tries to hold peoples minds in
ego-psychology in his literary techniques of sympathy, trust,
rhetoric, fragmentary knowledge by using the dream analysis for
interpretation to study the unconscious, but caused many people that
criticizes him. Freud believes that the “only treatment that can be
proved and being correct could produce true and permanent cures”
(Sollaway, 1992) in his psychoanalysis. As Carl Jung, who was one of
Freud’s closest friends, but has a different theory on the nature of
the unconscious with Freud. The greatest difference is that in the
unconscious, “there is a collective unconscious shared by all human
beings, containing universal memories, symbols, and images that are
the legacy of human history.”(Tavris & Wade, 2000) He called them
archetypes, which it symbolizes the “true self”. “Jung distinguished
the conscious self from the unconscious archetypes that govern our
behavior.” (Tavris & Wade, 2000) He also identified the personal
unconscious, which is called complexes; it can become conscious or
stay unconscious and interacts between a person’s collective
unconscious and environment. Not only Jung has difference with Freud’s
theory, Adler and Horney also are the one’s that has different views
in the human psyche.

Adler and Horney were people that had been working with Freud before,
but because of some different agreements, they broke with Freud and
went against him. Adler created the individual psychology. He
described the “inferiority complex”, which helps people to overcome
feelings of inferiority. The reason Adler left Freud because he sees
that he has obsession with sex and death, who put too much concern
with the past as himself , he sees it in future with expectations
rather than the past to explain our behaviors. As Horney also left
Freud because she has her own believes on the basic Anxiety that are
from the hostile world, which man has good and evil that are depended
on the environments. Once Adler and Honey were against Freud they
became as “Neo-Freudians”. They still have some commonalities with
Freud’s views on the human behaviors, role of instincts, but
emphasized the possibility of self-improvement. The commonalities that
they have with Freud’s have been the based methodology and still
studying on the unconscious of the Human Psyches. Even they have
commons; they have more divergence on Freud. Freud’s view of man is
everyone is selfish, sexually minded and aggressive divined. As on
“Neo-Freudians”, they believe people have the potential for good and
bad. Freud’s on Human Psyche was instinctual and universal, which are
opposite of Neo-Freudians that they depends on learning and on the
environment or situational that are from its relative. Having similar
methodologies or Ethnics between Freud’s and the “Neo-Freudian’s, it
had been spread out and involved with most of the psychodynamic
theories.

For finishing off between “Neo-Freudians” and Freud’s similarities on
the methodology, Freud’s on the free association view is seen as Bias,
that they associates from the support preconceived ideas and takes the
greatest leaps. It is based on Biological Determism. On the other
hand, neo Freudians free association was improved from the patients
that reports with the articles in the situation they worked as back
ward in systematically. As “…to Object-relations theorists, other
people are important sources of attachment.” (Tavris &Wade, 2000) and
“…to some object-relations analysts, the real origin of moral values
lies in the infant’s early relationship to the mother long before the
emergence of the superego, and it is me who have more limited moral
capacity.” (Tavris &Wade, 2000) Not only object-relation uses
methodology, but also Erik Erikson too. He studies the psyche social
in contact from Ana Freud. “Psychoanalysis assumes the early process
of differentiation between inside and outside to be the origin of
projection and introjections which remain some of our deepest and most
dangerous defense mechanisms. (Erikson, 1966) In Erikson’s eight
stages or social stages the methodology use was “a favorable ratio of
basic trust over mistrust is the first step in psychosocial
adaptation, a favorable ratio of autonomous will over shame and
doubt…”(Erikson, 1966) Shame and doubt is the next stage of the trust
and mistrust. As all of us know that psychology was never a “pure
psychology”, but is a complex psychobiology, which is an aspect that
increased being cryptic now. In the history of psychoanalysis of
Freud, it mentioned that “A supreme irony lies in Freud’s development
of concepts like censorship and repression and his clinical attempts
to overcome their supposedly pathogenic affects through psychotherapy”
(Sulloway, 1992) This happened when Freud began to study, he felt
pressured to show the world of his psychoanalysis until once he had
became famous because he treated the “rat man” of one of his patient
and that is how when Freud started his methodology studies from. Many
studies on methodology came from the past of childhood developments
too.

The influences of childhood developments had been studied by Freud,
Horney, Adler, Erikson and object-relation. As Jung he sees it only
one way, which means its one path of the childhood road not like
Erikson’s who made it into a eight stages path of childhood
development. In one of the Freud study on childhood would be fixation,
which means that being stuck or “fixed” in a development stage of an
early childhood life or even adulthood. Freud thinks that “first love
relation of the child is doomed to extinction for the very reason that
it is the first, for these early object-cathexes are always ambivalent
to a very high degree; alongside the child’s intense love there is
always a strong aggressive tendency present, and the more passionately
the child loves an object, the more sensitive it will be to
disappointments and frustration coming from it. In the end, the love
is bound to capitulate to the accumulated hostility.” (Freud, 1933)
Looking at this point of view from Freud is it most likely similar to
the theories of Erikson’s and Object relations. In Erikson’s view in
his first stage the Basic Trust and Basic Mistrust, is similar to
Freud’s., like the beginning of the breast feeding the baby for
providing the sense of ego identity. The trust does not come from the
experience that depend on food or love it’s about the maternal
relationship. The mother gives the sense of trust for what a baby
needs so then later the sense will be all right when is being oneself.
Basically if the babies have the trust in their mothers, the fewer
frustrations will form in the following stages of the life cycle.
“Children become neurotic not from frustrations, but from the lack or
loss of societal meaning in these frustrations.” (Hopcke, 1989) As in
“object relations theorists hold that the infant’s first two years are
the most critical for development of the analyst’s core of
personality. Freud emphasized the child’s fear of the father and
object-relations analysts emphasize the child’s need for the powerful
mother.”(Tavris & Wade, 2000) The object relation works in three
steps. 1) Depends on how you relate to an object, which means how you
will be developed in your life later on. 2) Depends if you’re raised
in good condition or bad condition that will lead your later life. 3)
“Splitting means the separating of the opposites: good and bad, right
and wrong, weak and strong, pleasure and pain.” “The key issue in life
is the constantly changing balance between independence and connection
to others. Such as Girls, who are the same sex as the mother, do not
need to separate from her, the mother treats a daughter as an
extension of herself. But boys, if they are to develop a male identity
must break away from the mother.” (Tavris & Wade, 2000) The last based
on childhood studies is Adler and Horney, the “Neo-Freudians” the
studies in the back work ways to understand the problems caused from
the childhood development view.

About “Neo-Freudians” They are based on the Western Milieu’s dependent
psychology of men and women that have been shaped.

Western Milieus dependent psychology has to do a part from the Culture
and Genders point of view in the psychodynamic. In Western view is
that men and women are about shape by patriadical society, division
between sexes influenced by economic and relaxing of gender role. The
social milieu has detracted from enhancing the potential development
of life in men and women society, they try be living in a best
environment and be against the characters forces. Basically this study
is for balancing out the struggles from men and women society in a
peaceful life. In culture and gender roles, all the psychodynamic
aspects in every theorist are involved in. “The original components of
the id, the sexual drives with which we are born, are impervious to
social and historical change.” (De Berg, 2003) Freud, as all you know
that he is really into sex drives and death issues. He believes that
everyone is all born selfishness, which causes the social and
antisocial. For his solution to this he said “We need both id-drives
and super-ego drives; only when there is a balance between the two can
we live happily as social beings. The fit between the individual and
society will therefore never be perfect.” (De Berg, 2003) In Jung
believes, he mentions that it refers to everyone’s self that is being
unique, universal and eternal. “…the one expressing man’s essence, and
the other being a God-image, an archetypal symbol” (Moacanin, 1986) He
called the female complex in man the anima and male complex in woman
the animus. It is also “psychologically through their enmeshment with
or distance from the cluster of archetypal images, which is Mother
within all of us.” (Hopcke, 1989) The most influenced in culture view
would be Erikson’s. Based on the social context, “his aim is to detect
the key psychological dimensions which characterize the culture---its
particular integrated pattern of values, beliefs, behaviors and
relationship.” He then tries and explains in his own studies on the
culture of white and Sioux between the two tribes. He then understood
and “recognized that cultural and economic factors affect these stages
of psychological development. Some societies, for example, make the
transition from one stage to another relatively easy. If you know you
are going to be a farmer like your mother and father and you have no
alternative, then moving from adolescence into young adulthood is not
a terribly painful step (unless you hate farming).” (Tavris & Wade,
2000)

As the matter of fact, most of Freud’s followers and friends were all
based on his under studies once you put all the psychodynamic theories
together in one piece. “Psychodynamic” is a group of theories that
emphasized or influenced on the instinct drives and forces. The most
important is the development experiences in shaping a person’s
personality. Focusing on the childhood it is what influenced the
unconscious drives and forces but it also got criticized
“psychodynamic psychology has been produced widespread controversy for
having new ideas and more researches. Over all in summary, the
conscious and unconscious studies, free association methodology
(Ethic), childhood, Culture and gender in psychodynamic views is that
there’s no absolute femininity or masculinity. Woman and men are
equal; it doesn’t depend on biological ways but more dependent in our
society. I think psychodynamic is to let us become who we truly are.
It is universal and we gain and lose of our skills through out our
lives. Even though, that psychology can never be proved that there’s
no answer to it, everything is jus a consideration or in theory that
we called it Fasifiability.