Compare and contrast the assumptions of behaviorism and psychoanalysis. Explain why these approaches made the assumptions they did, and critically evaluate each approach.
Behaviorism and psychoanalysis are two influential theories of psychology that are pole apart. The most basic difference between these two theories is in the way they define a behavior. While behaviorists believe that that almost every human emotion is conditioned by habit and can be learned or unlearned, psychoanalysts believe that everything humans do is completely controlled by the unconscious mind at some level.
Psychoanalysis is based on the theories proposed by Sigmund Freud. Freud proposed the idea that mental functions are on both conscious as well as unconscious levels. He believed that childhood events have a powerful psychological influence throughout a person’s life. With psychoanalysis, Freud tried to interpret the causes of patients ’problems by gaining an insight or revealing the unconscious processes to the conscious awareness.
According to Freud, the mind can be divided into three different levels: the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious. The conscious includes everything that we are aware of. Preconscious includes our memory, feelings and thoughts, which is not always part of consciousness but can be retrieved easily at any time and brought into our awareness. Finally, the unconscious contains all the feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that are outside of our conscious awareness. The contents of the unconscious mind, Freud believed, are mostly unpleasant. He believed that the unconscious is mostly important because it continues to influence our behavior and experience, even though we are not always aware of these underly...
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In his book, Psychological Care of the Infants and Child, he crititicized child rearing practices prevalent in those times. He advocated a regulatory rather than permissive system of child rearing. In this way, we can see that even Watson believed that childhood experiences were important in building the personality of an individual. He stressed the importance of encouraging children to be productive from an early age. However, while Freud suggested an entirely sex- driven instinct in children and infants, Watson originally accepted idea of instincts, but later said they were merely due to conditioning
He insisted that psychology restrict itself to objective study of behavior. While Freud’s psychoanalysis used hypnosis, free association and talk therapy to understand the causes of behavior and disorders in patients’, Watson claimed that observation is
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The first basis of Freud 's belief system was found in the existence of the personal unconscious. The mind is a substance that incorporates much more than the simple conscious component. The unconscious component is the much larger than the
Sigmund Freud is known for creating the concept of psychoanalysis, also known as psychoanalytic theory, which requires one to explore the unconscious mind. Over time, his theories have been revised as well as criticized in a variety of ways. Be that as it may, they have remained strong influences within the world of psychiatry, as well as in the worlds of film and literature. Many works generally exhibit Freudian influences, balancing the conscious life with the subconscious and dreamlike undertones. Key ideas of Freudian Psychoanalysis are the three psychic zones of id, ego and super-ego, the libido, and the Oedipus complex.
In 1913 a new movement in psychology appeared, Behaviorism. “Introduced by John Broadus Watson when he published the classic article Psychology as the behaviorist views it.” Consequently, Behaviorism (also called the behaviorist approach) was the primary paradigm in psychology between 1920 to 1950 and is based on a number of underlying ‘rules’: Psychology should be seen as a science; Behaviorism is primarily concerned with observable behavior, as opposed to internal events, like thinking and emotion; People have no free will – a person’s environment determines their behavior; Behavior is the result of stimulus resulting in a response; and All behavior is learned from the environment. How we process these stimuli and learn from our surrounds
Watson was an American psychologist that helped path the way for other researchers in psychology. He was born on January 9th, 1878, in South Carolina. His mother was devoted to religion and she pushed her ideals and morals onto him. She prohibited smoking, drinking, adultery, and other sinful acts. This led to Watson growing up hating religion and eventually, opposing it. Also, Watson was a delinquent when he was young, he was arrested twice and did poorly academically; but, with the help of his mother and her connections, it gave him an opportunity to attend Furman University of South Carolina. This gave him a second chance and he didn’t take it for granted. Watson graduated with a master’s when he was 21. After he finished his years in Furman University, he was presented with an offer from University of Chicago, for his graduates study in psychology. Once he finished his graduate degree, he stayed there as a research
The psychoanalytic perspective was first discovered by Sigmund Freud which uncovers the nature of the mind and leads to the discovery of the unconscious. The unconscious is layered underneath as the proprietary element of the individuals mind, it is built over time and is only revealed through dreams, and slips. The development of the unconscious can be built at an early stage, as it shapes our personality. The individual does not have access to the unconscious as it’s deep in the mind and we find these events and feelings unacceptable for our conscious.
John Broadus Watson (1878-1958) has become well known for being the founder of behaviorism as a school of thought throughout American psychology. His view on psychology consisted of seeing it as a science of observation on behaviors. He believed that one must first observe a behavior in a certain environment or situation, then predict and determine the connection between the two. Much of his theory was based on the work of Ivan Pavlov’s observations through classical conditioning. Watson claimed that the process of classical conditioning could be used to explain any behavioral factor in human psychology. Classical conditioning involves the pairing of two different stimuli in producing a learning response from the participant. His belief on the topic was that single differences in behavior were caused by different experiences of learning.
Behaviorism is a branch of psychology that has a theoretical approach that gives emphasis to the study of behavior in place of the subject of the mind or the physiological correlates of one's behavior. Behavior is the externally visible response to a stimulus of an animal or human (Weidman). B.F. Skinner is one of the most prominent psychologists of the study of behaviorism. Skinner was on the advance of behaviorism. B.F. Skinner created a group of theories that set out to prove that subjective impetus is not what behavior in humans and animals is so much based on but that behavior is more based on possible reward received and chastisement applied to the animal or human (Newsmakers). Skinner entered into the branch of behaviorism in the 1920s. Behaviorism was still a fairly new branch to psychology at this time. However, Skinner's experiments in his libratory were broadly consideration to be electrifying and ground-breaking, illuminating an knowledge of human behavior and logistics (Newsmakers). Skinner called such behavior based on possible reward received and chastisement that was followed by the repetition of that behavior operant.
Sigmund Freud created strong theories in science and medicine that are still studied today. Freud was a neurologist who proposed many distinctive theories in psychiatry, all based upon the method of psychoanalysis. Some of his key concepts include the ego/superego/id, free association, trauma/fantasy, dream interpretation, and jokes and the unconscious. “Freud remained a determinist throughout his life, believing that all vital phenomena, including psychological phenomena like thoughts, feelings and phantasies, are rigidly determined by the principle of cause and effect” (Storr, 1989, p. 2). Through the discussion of those central concepts, Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis becomes clear as to how he construed human character.
Features of the Psychoanalytic and Humanistic Perspectives Outline the key features of the psychoanalytic and humanistic perspectives, and briefly compare and contrast their views on conscious experience, a person as an integrated whole, and the role of therapists in arriving at changes. Answer In explaining and predicting animal behaviour, different schools of psychology are of different perspectives; e.g. cognitive approach focuses on the mental processes, behaviourism is based on external stimuli and reinforcement, biological approach is concerned with the relationship between the mind and body and the influence of heredity. However, they are only cope with a specific part of people, but neglect human as a whole.
In conclusion, the theory of behaviorism is based on observable behaviors for easier quantification and data collection. Effective techniques such as behavior intervention and discrete trial training originate from this school of thought. The approaches are very essential in altering the maladaptive behaviors in adults and children (Cherry, 2011). Today, conditioning and the use of reward and punishment are used to help people learn accepted behavior and in other cases to help them stop problematic behavior (Coon & Mitterer, 2008). This has made behavior modification and training easy and possible. Therefore, Dr. John Watson played a tremendous role in the transition of psychology from the work of earlier scholars to the modern scholars.
The aim of this essay is to analyse four theoretical approaches to psychology, including psychodynamic, humanistic, cognitive and behavioural. Analysing each approach in detail and identifying key features the approach uses to explain human behaviour. This essay will also analyse how successful each approach is in it methods, evidence gathering techniques and analyse how it can be applied to giving reasons for particular human behaviours. As well as analysing each approaches failings in it theories, methods and evidence gathering techniques.
Introspection and behaviorism used to be two very popular styles of research. Introspection is the process of observing one's own mental, or emotional processes. Whereas behaviorism is the theory that both human and animal behavior can be changed by conditioning. These styles created a new way for researchers to expand their theories. While this style of research was prominent for several years, the psychology community soon began to realize that they both had certain limitations.
In this therapeutic approach, he outlines that the therapist and the patient must collectively work together to bring the contents of the patients unconscious into the patient’s conscious awareness. When the patient’s unconscious conflicts are evoked, the therapist helps the patient deal with them positively. Freud was extremely influential in shaping the public view of psychology. Many of his ideas and contributions are cannot be tested using scientific methods, but psychologists widely accept the idea of unconscious mental processes. What people personally go though is extremely important in the study of psychology. ( Grison, Heatherton, Gazzaniga ,2015)
There are three types of behaviorism. The first, methodological is a normative theory about the scientific conduct of psychology. It claims that psychology should concern itself with the behavior of organisms and not with mental states or events or with constructing internal information processing accounts of behavior. ("Behaviorism," 2000) The second is psychological behaviorism. It explains human and animal behavior in terms of external physical stimuli, responses, learning histories and reinforcements. The last type is analytical or logical behaviorism. This theory has a philosophy about the meaning of mental terms and concepts. The idea of the mental state is the idea of behavioral tendencies that shows how a person behaves in one situation compared to another.
Behaviorism is defined as a school of psychology that takes the objective evidence of behavior (as measured responses to stimuli) as the only concern of its research and the only basis of its theory without reference to conscious experience (Merriam-Webster). B.F skinner, Ivan Pavlov and John B. Watson are known as the fathers’ of behaviorism. They all had a different prospective on what makes someone learn, the one thing they had in common is reinforcement methods. Their experiments did have enough true findings to spark others to want to explore how behaviorism affects learning. Behaviorists often look at learning as a characteristic of conditioning and will promote a system of prizes and targets in education.