Psychology

-a volatile science-

Cazacu Stefan-Codrin

12 D

Prof. POPA DIANA

Colegiul National “Gheorghe Vranceanu”

 Summary
Foreword

1.1Sigmund Freud
1.1.1 -The unconscious Mind
1.1.2 -Psychosexual Stages
1.1.3 -Dream analysis
2.Cognitive psychology
 Foreword

Psychology has always been my dearest passion even though I didn’t realize it. I used to
love trying to figure out how other people think and perceive the world and the reasons behind it.
The behaviour itself and the thought process that generated it are key aspects of understanding
the human psyche. Having said that, this also implies that Psychology does rely on a network of
sciences to be able to progress and develop in an efficient way. Human anatomy among others is
a really important scientific aspect that motivates each psychological fact in a unique way.

As time went by, my preference has started to focus on the behavioural, cognitive and
pathological branches of this science. From being able to learn and understand body language
and using this in day-to-day activities, to reading about new neural pathways, which have been
discovered recently, that completely change the way we see some things about our mind.
Learning about diseases is also really interesting and can become confusing since you have the
symptoms but you don t necessarily have a cure for it. This can complicate things as you try and
diagnose different disorders because they might have similar traits and act the same way, but
cause different problems which can be really severe.

Another fascinating aspect related to psychology is how young it is when it comes to the
scientific aspect. It barely exceeds 160 years of age, which might seem a lot of time, but we're
talking about something that was with us from the beginning although we didn t really
understand it. This implies that in order to study this science you have to be open to change and
be ready for discoveries that might change everything that seemed to be exact up to that point.
Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939) was the founding father of psychoanalysis, a method for treating
mental illness and also a theory that explains human behavior. Freud believed that events in our
childhood have a great influence on our adult lives, shaping our personality. For example,
anxiety originating from traumatic experiences in a person's past is hidden from consciousness
and may cause problems during adulthood (in the form of neuroses).

Thus, when we explain our behavior to ourselves or others (conscious mental activity), we rarely
give a true account of our motivation. This is not because we are deliberately lying. While
human beings are great deceivers of others; they are even more adept at self-deception. Freud's
life work was dominated by his attempts to find ways of penetrating this often subtle and
elaborate camouflage that obscures the hidden structure and processes of personality. His lexicon
has become embedded within the vocabulary of Western society. Words he introduced through
his theories are now used by everyday people, such as anal (personality), libido, denial,
repression, cathartic, Freudian slip, and neurotic.

The Case of Anna O

The case of Anna O (real name Bertha Pappenheim) marked a turning point in the career of a
young Viennese neuropathologist by the name of Sigmund Freud. It even went on to influence
the future direction of psychology as a whole.

Anna O. suffered from hysteria, a condition in which the patient exhibits physical symptoms
(e.g., paralysis, convulsions, hallucinations, loss of speech) without an apparent physical cause.
Her doctor (and Freud's teacher) Josef Breuer succeeded in treating Anna by helping her to recall
forgotten memories of traumatic events.

During discussions with her, it became apparent that she had developed a fear of drinking when a
dog she hated drank from her glass. Her other symptoms originated when caring for her sick
father. She would not express her anxiety for her illness but did express it later, during
psychoanalysis. As soon as she had the opportunity to make these unconscious thoughts
conscious her paralysis disappeared. Breuer discussed the case with his friend Freud. Out of
these discussions came the germ of an idea that Freud was to pursue for the rest of his life. In
Studies in Hysteria (1895) Freud proposed that physical symptoms are often the surface
manifestations of deeply repressed conflicts. However, Freud was not just advancing an
explanation of a particular illness. Implicitly he was proposing a revolutionary new theory of the
human psyche itself. This theory emerged “bit by bit” as a result of Freud’s clinical
investigations, and it led him to propose that there were at least three levels of the mind.

The Unconscious Mind

Freud (1900, 1905) developed a topographical model of the mind, whereby he described the
features of the mind’s structure and function. Freud used the analogy of an iceberg to describe
the three levels of the mind.

On the surface is consciousness, which consists of those thoughts that are the focus of our
attention now, and this is seen as the tip of the iceberg. The preconscious consists of all which
can be retrieved from memory. The third and most significant region is the unconscious. Here lie
the processes that are the real cause of most behavior. Like an iceberg, the most important part of
the mind is the part you cannot see. The unconscious mind acts as a repository, a ‘cauldron’ of
primitive wishes and impulse kept at bay and mediated by the preconscious area.

The Psyche
Freud (1923) later developed a more structural model of the mind comprising the entities id, ego, and
superego (what Freud called “the psychic apparatus”). These are not physical areas within the brain, but
rather hypothetical conceptualizations of important mental functions. The id, ego, and superego have
most commonly been conceptualized as three essential parts of the human personality. Freud assumed
the id operated at an unconscious level according to the pleasure principle (gratification from satisfying
basic instincts).

The id comprises two kinds of biological instincts (or drives) which Freud called Eros and
Thanatos. Eros, or life instinct, helps the individual to survive; it directs life-sustaining activities
such as respiration, eating, and sex (Freud, 1925). The energy created by the life instincts is
known as libido.

In contrast, Thanatos or death instinct is viewed as a set of destructive forces present in all
human beings (Freud, 1920). When this energy is directed outward onto others, it is expressed as
aggression and violence. Freud believed that Eros is stronger than Thanatos, thus enabling
people to survive rather than self-destruct.
The ego develops from the id during infancy. The ego's goal is to satisfy the demands of the id in
a safe a socially acceptable way. In contrast to the id, the ego follows the reality principle as it
operates in both the conscious and unconscious mind.

The superego develops during early childhood (when the child identifies with the same-sex
parent) and is responsible for ensuring moral standards are followed. The superego operates on
the morality principle and motivates us to behave in a socially responsible and acceptable
manner.

The basic dilemma of all human existence is that each element of the psychic apparatus makes
demands upon us that are incompatible with the other two. Inner conflict is inevitable.

For example, the superego can make a person feel guilty if rules are not followed. When there is
a conflict between the goals of the id and superego, the ego must act as a referee and mediate this
conflict. The ego can deploy various defense mechanisms (Freud, 1894, 1896) to prevent it from
becoming overwhelmed by anxiety.

Psychosexual Stages

In the highly repressive “Victorian” society in which Freud lived and worked women, in
particular, were forced to repress their sexual needs. In many cases, the result was some form of
neurotic illness. Freud sought to understand the nature and variety of these illnesses by retracing
the sexual history of his patients. This was not primarily an investigation of sexual experiences
as such. Far more important were the patient’s
 wish
es and desires, their experience of love, hate, shame, guilt and fear – and how they handled these
powerful emotions. It was this that led to the most controversial part of Freud’s work – his theory
of psychosexual development and the Oedipus complex. Freud believed that children are born
with a libido – a sexual (pleasure) urge. There are a number of stages of childhood, during which
the child seeks pleasure from a different ‘object.’

To be psychologically healthy, we must successfully complete each stage. Mental abnormality can occur
if a stage is not completed successfully and the person becomes ‘fixated’ in a particular stage. This
particular theory shows how adult personality is determined by childhood experiences.

Dream Analysis

Freud (1900) considered dreams to be the royal road to the unconscious as it is in dreams that
the ego's defenses are lowered so that some of the repressed material comes through to
awareness, albeit in distorted form. Dreams perform important functions for the unconscious
mind and serve as valuable clues to how the unconscious mind operates.

On 24 July 1895, Freud had his own dream that was to form the basis of his theory. He had been
worried about a patient, Irma, who was not doing as well in treatment as he had hoped. Freud, in
fact, blamed himself for this and was feeling guilty. Freud dreamed that he met Irma at a party
and examined her. He then saw a chemical formula for a drug that another doctor had given Irma
flash before his eyes and realized that her condition was caused by a dirty syringe used by the
other doctor. Freud's guilt was thus relieved.

Freud interpreted this dream as wish-fulfillment. He had wished that Irma's poor condition was
not his fault and the dream had fulfilled this wish by informing him that another doctor was at
fault. Based on this dream, Freud (1900) went on to propose that a major function of dreams was
the fulfillment of wishes. Freud distinguished between the manifest content of a dream (what the
dreamer remembers) and the latent content, the symbolic meaning of the dream (i.e., the
underlying wish). The manifest content is often based on the events of the day.

The process whereby the underlying wish is translated into the manifest content is called dream-
work. The purpose of dreamwork is to transform the forbidden wish into a non-threatening form,
thus reducing anxiety and allowing us to continue sleeping. Dreamwork involves the process of
condensation, displacement, and secondary elaboration.

The process of condensation is the joining of two or more ideas/images into one. For example, a
dream about a man may be a dream about both one's father and one's lover. A dream about a
house might be the condensation of worries about security as well as worries about one's
appearance to the rest of the world.

Displacement takes place when we transform the person or object we are really concerned about
to someone else. For example, one of Freud’s patients was extremely resentful of his sister-in-
law and used to refer to her as a dog, dreamed of strangling a small white dog.

Freud interpreted this as representing his wish to kill his sister-in-law. If the patient would have
really dreamed of killing his sister-in-law, he would have felt guilty. The unconscious mind
transformed her into a dog to protect him.

Secondary elaboration occurs when the unconscious mind strings together wish-fulfilling images
in a logical order of events, further obscuring the latent content. According to Freud, this is why
the manifest content of dreams can be in the form of believable events.
In Freud’s later work on dreams, he explored the possibility of universal symbols in dreams.
Some of these were sexual in nature, including poles, guns, and swords representing the penis
and horse riding and dancing representing sexual intercourse.

However, Freud was cautious about symbols and stated that general symbols are more personal
rather than universal. A person cannot interpret what the manifest content of a dream symbolized
without knowing about the person’s circumstances.

'Dream dictionaries', which are still popular now, were a source of irritation to Freud. In an
amusing example of the limitations of universal symbols, one of Freud's patients, after dreaming
about holding a wriggling fish, said to him 'that's a Freudian symbol - it must be a penis!'

Freud explored further, and it turned out that the woman's mother, who was a passionate
astrologer and a Pisces, was on the patient's mind because she disapproved of her daughter being
in analysis. It seems more plausible, as Freud suggested, that the fish represented the patient's
mother rather than a penis!

Freud's Followers

Freud attracted many followers, who formed a famous group in 1902 called the "Psychological
Wednesday Society." The group met every Wednesday in Freud's waiting room. As the
organization grew, Freud established an inner circle of devoted followers, the so-called
"Committee" (including Sàndor Ferenczi, and Hanns Sachs (standing) Otto Rank, Karl Abraham,
Max Eitingon, and Ernest Jones). At the beginning of 1908, the committee had 22 members and
renamed themselves the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.
Cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of the mind as an information processor. Cognitive
psychologists try to build up cognitive models of the information processing that goes on inside
people’s minds, including perception, attention, language, memory, thinking, and consciousness.

Cognitive psychology became of great importance in the mid-1950s. Several factors were
important in this:
1. Dissatisfaction with the behaviorist approach in its simple emphasis on external behavior
rather than internal processes.

2. The development of better experimental methods.

3. Comparison between human and computer processing of information.

The emphasis of psychology shifted away from the study of conditioned behavior and
psychoanalytical notions about the study of the mind, towards the understanding of human
information processing, using strict and rigorous laboratory investigation.

Basic Assumptions

Mediational processes occur between stimulus and response:

Behaviourists rejected the idea of studying the mind because internal mental processes
cannot be observed and objectively measured. However, cognitive psychologists regard it as
essential to look at the mental processes of an organism and how these influence behaviour.
Instead of the simple stimulus-response links proposed by behaviourism, the mediational
processes of the organism are important to understand. Without this understanding, psychologists
cannot have a complete understanding of behaviour.

Psychology should be seen as a science: Cognitive psychologists follow the example of

the behaviourists in preferring objective, controlled, scientific methods for investigating
behaviour. They use the results of their investigations as the basis for making inferences about
mental processes.

Humans are information processors: Information processing in humans resembles that in

computers, and is based on transforming information, storing information and retrieving
information from memory. Information processing models of cognitive processes such as
memory and attention assume that mental processes follow a clear sequence.

For example:

 Input processes are concerned with the analysis of the stimuli.

 Storage processes cover everything that happens to stimuli internally in the brain and can
include coding and manipulation of the stimuli.
  Output processes are responsible for preparing an appropriate response to a stimulus.
Information Processing

The cognitive approach began to revolutionize psychology in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
to become the dominant approach (i.e., perspective) in psychology by the late 1970s. Interest in
mental processes had been gradually restored through the work of Piaget and Tolman.

Tolman was a ‘soft behaviourist’. His book Purposive Behaviour in Animals and Man in
1932 described research which behaviourism found difficult to explain. The behaviorists’ view
had been that learning took place as a result of associations between stimuli and responses.

However, Tolman suggested that learning was based on the relationships formed amongst
stimuli. He referred to these relationships as cognitive maps.

But it was the arrival of the computer that gave cognitive psychology the terminology and
metaphor it needed to investigate the human mind. The start of the use of computers allowed
psychologists to try to understand the complexities of human cognition by comparing it with
something simpler and better understood, i.e., an artificial system such as a computer.

The use of the computer as a tool for thinking how the human mind handles information is
known as the computer analogy. Essentially, computer codes (i.e., changes) information, stores
information, use information and produces an output (retrieves info).

The idea of information processing was adopted by cognitive psychologists as a model of how
human thought works. The information processing approach is based on a number of
assumptions, including:

1. Information made available from the environment is processed by a series of processing

systems (e.g., attention, perception, short-term memory);

2. These processing systems transform, or alter the information in systematic ways;

3. The aim of the research is to specify the processes and structures that underlie cognitive
performance;

4. Information processing in humans resembles that in computers. Mediational Processes The

behaviorists approach only studies external observable (stimulus and response) behavior which
can be objectively measured. They believe that internal behavior cannot be studied because we
cannot see what happens in a person’s mind (and therefore cannot objectively measure it). In
comparison, the cognitive approach believes that internal mental behavior can be scientifically
studied using experiments. Cognitive psychology assumes that a mediational process occurs
between stimulus/input and response/output.

The mediational (i.e., mental) event could be memory, perception, attention or problem solving,
etc. These are known as mediational processes because they mediate between the stimulus and
the response. They come after the stimulus and before the response. Therefore, cognitive
psychologists’ say if you want to understand behavior, you have to understand these mediational
processes.

Conclusion
 All in all, Psychology is something that we should always care about, especially
nowadays since the technological discoveries make our lives more sedentary. Having said that,
we can easily guess the possible reasons behind the rise in depression and other anxiety-related
disorders in the last decades. Although the situation might look really bad and out of control, not
all hope is lost because of the importance people have started to give to therapy itself.

Understanding one’s self is crucial to personal development and a balanced life. Being
progressively aware of your thoughts and feelings might not seem so important but it can
actually benefit your life very much. This is why you should take a few minutes to analyse what
you are about to say or do. A different approach to a conversation can positively impact the
outcome of it in most cases.

Be brave! Don’t shy away from opening up or talking about how you feel. This can only
work in your favour. Even though society tends to frown upon this kind of situation, there is
nothing shameful about being honest to yourself. Repressing your emotions will only make
matters worse, and slow down the healing process.Believe in yourself and don’t give up on your
mental and emotional health! There is always hope!