Compare And Contrast The Psychodynamic And Behaviourist Approach

Psychology is a multifaceted science that embraces both conscious and unconscious parts of the human mind that includes a lot of sub-fields, such as human development, sports, health, clinical, social behavior and cognitive processes. Throughout the years, there have developed many theoretical approaches in order to categorise these fields, and create a structured field of research for psychology. Some of these approaches include behaviourism, psychoanalysis, cognitive and humanism. Although these approaches are the dominant viewpoints in psychology and have been praised for their main concepts and ideas, they have been met with various criticisms over the years. The behaviourist approach assumes that behaviour is a byproduct of

This approach studies each person as a unique individual and on a personal level, also called idiographic, by focusing on their own thought process that led to a reaction or behaviour. In addition, it is a holistic approach, meaning it believes that psychology should study a person as a whole (class notes, 2016). It was developed as an argument against, and an answer to the criticisms that the psychodynamic and behaviourist approach faced (McLeod, 2015). It also focuses on personal responsibility, free will and the individual’s striving for personal growth and development, and uses a technique called phenomenology that involves reporting direct experience and avoiding interpreting it (class notes, 2016). Moreover, it completely rejected the two approaches due to their deterministic nature, and has been deemed dehumanising by various humanistic psychologists (McLeod, 2015). One of the internal approaches within this perspective is the person-centred approach, which is named as such because of the approach’s focus on a person’s subjective experience and subjective point of view (Pennington et al., 2003). Due to this outlook, the theory rejects the importance of objective reality and puts an emphasis on subjective perceptions and understanding, and psychology laboratories are often rejected for research on human and animal subjects (McLeod, 2015). In order to measure individual perceptions in depth, humanism also rejects scientific methodologies, and instead focuses on diary accounts, open-ended questionnaires, unstructured interviews and unstructured observations, also known as qualitative research (McLeod, 2015). Because of this, it has been met with criticisms for its