A psychodynamic
approach. That starts out with a person that you're familiar with
called Sigmund Freud but essentially the school of thought as a whole
attempts to explain personality, motivation,
and underlying problems with psychopathology which is to say
the stuff we'll cover in abnormal psychology chapter.
We're all part of this unconscious process
that you have a universe in yourself so to speak.
Metaphorically, you are a world unto yourself and most of it you're not aware
of it.
It's operating unconsciously, which is a very strange concept,
so that that's what's driving your experiences. Sigmund Freud gets him a
little asterisk. We'll get back to Sigmund Freud when we talk about
personality, when we get to the personality chapter,
we'll go into some of the aspects of what he considered to be essential
functions of personality development, essential stages of personality
development and how that produced
an individual at the end of the process, that was relatively entrenched
in who they were. So he, as an Austrian physician,
founding the school, made up a theory. Now you've to to take Sigmund
Freud with a grain of salt. He was a racist misogynist.
Rght? He didn't like women and it comes out pretty strong in his theory. And why I say he didn't
like them
he was just a patriarchal dude like most of them and a white one at that.
He thought that women were not the equivalent of men. They were lesser than.
So they had more problems because they were inherently inferior.
He said all of us have problems so he wasn't putting men way up there but
he wasn't kind in his theorizing
but if you look at the times when he existed it fell right in line with most
of the dominant thinking of the times.
So that if he saw women as patients, that was kind of what he expected to see
because the men were
still put together, and they weren't really put together as we can see.
People all have internal conflicts and they all have external conflicts
but the women who sought him out were middle class Viennese women who...
to say that they had leisure time to seek out a physician, they had money to go do it,
and the would go sit in this man's office on his couch and they would talk to him about
problems they were having
and then he would theorize why they had this problem, the psychopathology
and he under-girded that with a whole theory of personality. When I say he made it up
I don't mean that he just did it willy-nilly. This is one
very thorough person. If you read his stuff
you will be stunned and amazed. Read his lectures when he came to America.
You read that stuff and you're thinking oh yes but this, that's what you're thinking and then
by golly the next sentence you're probably thinking this and he'll answer that
criticism and he's so
thorough that everything you could think up as a counter-argument to him
it seems like he's addressed it. The problem with it really is
it doesn't lend itself to operationalization. You can't really
define it in terms that are easy to measure.
So you've got this really fancy sounding theory that seems to encompass all of
human experience
but you can't test it. And if you know anything about scientific method
and theorizing in the scientific paradigm you need to be able to test
your theories
before you have any kind of confidence that they are valid and he
didn't do that. He was not a researcher
and he was very much entrenched in his own
paradigms of his time and that's his daughter Anna Freud who ironically being
female
became world famous as a child psychoanalyst.
She contributed a lot and added on to his theories
and modified some of his theories so his own daughter was a little bit of an
exception to him.
But what he's suggesting is we're not masters of our mind. We'd like to think
we're masters of our mind.
We delude ourselves from Freud's point of view into thinking that we are
making our own face so to speak, but he says really, what's driving your behavior on
a moment to moment basis
is not what you think is happening but an unconscious and subconscious mind
that you developed when you were an infant.
So that when you were in your mother's arms
or your surrogate mother's arms as a baby your personality was being imprinted
upon you in those experiences
and then as you go through toddler-hood, preadolescence, and adolescence
you are stamped into who you become in a way that is so
so entrenched that you're not even aware of it so therefore you don't have a
whole lot a chance to change it.
He'd be happy to see you in psychoanalysis as many days a week as
you could afford to go for as many years you'd like to go there but he didn't hold out a whole lot of
hope that you were going to change
because in his mind your mind, that's driving your experience, is largely unconscious.
He's onto that as a notion and in fact
unconsciousness does seem to be empirically verifiable in some ways.
But it's a hard thing for most people to grasp. So he said your most primitive urges
and drives, right? - sex, power,
aggression, wanting what you want because you want it, are what's really motivating you
but you can't express that openly in society for fear
that society will put you in check and so you then
push all that down into the unconscious. It's still there,
it's still operating but it comes out in ways that have been adapted
to fit society and your not being aware of it means that
you then, for him, invent rationale for what you do.
So he is a determinist and the psychoanalytic
theories are saying that you are determined
early on in life to do certain things later in life. Your early experiences
then drive
your later behavior but you not being aware of them means you're not in a position to
really
explore them or to change them that much and that's a hard thing for a lot of
people to swallow and I would say that's probably one of Freud's biggest
biggest contributions is he pissed people off.
People were like you're a crazy man why would you say these things? He's talking about
infant sexuality and stuff that people had se... you didn't even talk about sexuality
back in those days,
and he's talking about it. So some people were just horrified by the things he
suggested and they went and started doing research to prove him wrong.
Other people read him and thought this man's a genius - he's onto things that nobody has
ever considered before and
they seem valid to us and they went and did research to prove him
right. So what you see is a person so controversial
but yet so thorough that he's believable on the surface
spurring on the science of psychology
with people in his camp and people outside his camp trying to prove him right or
prove him wrong,
and so in that sense he moved us forward in big ways
and very controversial and that
that is a thing that still stands with us today. You can read Freud today and it's still
relevant.
It still makes sense. In fact, I would encourage you to read some.
It's interesting, it's fascinating, but you're not probably going to read it and go oh yeah
that's exactly the way I would have thought about it
because we have all this history of research in psychology since him
that has given us much more firm footing based in empirical
foundations than what he was trying to get at without the benefit of the
scientific method
or any kind of research that was formal in any straightforward way.
This brings us to behaviorism. Behaviorism now
is a reaction in some ways. As we'll see John Watson starts it off.
But looking at structuralism and consciousness, you want to model it after
the hard sciences then what do you want, you want hard data,
but introspection for a behaviorist isn't hard data.
That's asking you what you feel, what you think, what you perceive, what's your
emotional processes, what are your mental processes.
And then you go over to functionalism, essentially they're dealing with the same
territory without
any more additional empirical verification.
Then you've got psychoanalysis saying well it's all inside you and unconscious and in your
deep
deep subconscious and unconscious mind. We can't get to that even using
introspection.
So for the behaviors they said you know what, that all smacks of non-scientific
inquiry to us. We want to be scientific.
We want to be empirical. Well what can we do?
We can measure behavior. Behavior is objective.
Behavior occurs in a way that we could get a number of people together
to define operationally what we might call a behavior
and then we could all observe it and agree or disagree whether we saw it or not.
Alright? We could get multiple observers. We could get single observers but one thing is for
sure
behavior either occurs or it doesn't occur and it's measurable.
Intensity, frequency, duration - those are properties that we can measure behavior
within and this school asserts that behavior is governed by
stimuli - detectable input is what stimulus is -
anything in your environment that you can perceive is a stimulus. In fact you can have
internal stimuli.
Right? If your stomach starts growling that's an
internal stimulus to tell you you are hungry. Right? That would then drive your behavior
to seek out food. The behaviorists are rather strict in
their interpretation which is also determinist that
the stimuli in your environment prompt responses
which then bring about consequences that make it more or less likely that you'll
do the same kind of behavior
in similar situations in the future or that you'll be less likely to do the
same kind of behavior
in similar situations in the future and in that sense it's also known as
stimulus-response psychology
in old school terms. Now that's another radical notion because people don't like
that idea.
They don's say I'm - I'm not a rat in a cage. You can't just feed me a piece of cheese and I do whatever,
but in a way we do respond similarly to lower animals.
John Watson showed us this with a couple of studies that are
classics, one of which we'll go over, the Little Albert Study.
Father of behaviorism. Right?
Thought it was unworthy to study consciousness because you can't see it. I can't
weight it, I can't put it on a table.
I can't get at that except through some subjective interpretation you're having
about your
consciousness which you then relate to me. So he thought it was a flawed
method. It's unobservable, I'm just getting
subjective reports. I want to study behavior because it can be measured
in a verifiable manner.Thus it's hard data,
thus it emulates the harder sciences and thus we have
a firm footing for what he considered to be scientific inquiry.
Right? There's a picture - ain't he a smooth looking cat. Yeah!
There's him hugging Rosalie Alberta Rayner
and we find out that he was forced to resign from Johns Hopkins in 1920 because he
had an affair with his grad student Rosalie Rayner.
He was actually married at the time and he started playing around on the side. He's got a reputation for being
a ladies man.
He is a suave looking dude right? Apparently he's a smooth operator too.
He married Rosalie - got basically booted out of psychology
because of his behavior, right?
The irony of all ironies right? A man who studies behavior
can't continue to study behavior because of his behavior.
So he has to go on and he takes that pretty well,
uses his knowledge in psychology, goes into advertising and makes a fortune.
So if you're interested - advertising, mass com, marketing and things like that
you should consider psychology as a major or a minor because
it's relevant; it's very, very relevant.
He's another controversial theorist and somebody else comes along
someone even more controversial than him because he was in the business so much
longer.
It's still the basis of many educational and treatment practices.
If you look at the best treatment for autism
it's almost 24/7 applied behavior analysis.
If you can afford that and most can't or get access to it and most can't get access to it
you see remarkable outcomes. In some cases
it looks as though it's almost cured. Applied behavior analysis
is very, very practical in certain kinds of settings.
Working with people with mental retardation, working with any children
in a learning environment. So, if you were going to be a teacher,
learning the learning principles will help you tremendously
in managing the behavior in your classroom so that learning is more
likely to be accomplished.
It got a big boost from a guy named Ivan Pavlov whom we're going to talk about
when we get into that chapter.
He trained dogs to salivate to sounds - BING -
slobber dog - BING - slobber dog.
You should go as a critical thinker or a developing critical thinker
well who cares about some slobbering dogs - and I'm going to give you some reasons
to care about slobbering dogs because it has
major implications on all kinds of other issues
not the least of which are how you acquired taste aversions. You ever have
that thing where
you can't hardly stand the smell a particular kind of food because you got sick on
it before?
Right? Or you have the experience of some phobias,
or you have the problem of drug abuse.
Because that little slobbering dog is relevant to all of that stuff
in ways that you may not see readily on the surface but it triggered a lot of
animal research
and not everybody is okay with animal research and if you're not OK with
animal research, I'm okay with that. I would just say as a caveat
keep in mind that almost every medical procedure
from which we all benefit, if you've got grandparents or parents or siblings or
yourself
or friends who have ever benefited from some medical procedure
we do have animals to thank for that. They went through some tough times
to advance our medical knowledge and we now have an ethics board that governs
animal research so that they minimize suffering but that ain't to say that they
alleviate it
and so some people are very, very passionate that animal research shouldn't be done. I
can respect that.
On the other side I see the benefits of the science
that uses animals in the past at least to bring us knowledge that's relevant today in
ways that are
very important. So B.F. Skinner got him a little asterisk as did
John Watson because he's another behaviorist. He's a huge name.
One of my favorites. Very misunderstood. Very controversial.
Mostly cause he's misunderstood but not only that. He wasn't really doing much to
endear himself to the
the public in terms of translating his ideas. He did try to do that. He actually
wrote a novel
based on some of the principles he discovered called Walden Two.
If you ever get a chance to read Walden Two, that's a very interesting novel.
You may or may not agree with some of the stuff you read in there but he has a
debate actually going on about whether
this is worth doing. He has another thing called Beyond
Freedom and Dignity. Beyond Freedom and Dignity.
People like freedom and dignity. I don't know that we want to go beyond it. A lot of people have problems
with those concepts
and I understand that. I do myself to some degree. He emphasized the
environmental
factors in determining behavior such that perhaps it's the environment that you
see people
in that's actually determining their behavior on the job, in the school,
in the house, right? It's the stuff that goes on around them that drives their
behavior
more than a choice of their own free will. In fact, the behaviorists don't really
think much of free-will
any more than a psychoanalyst. They think that you're really a product of a
learning history.
There's old BF Skinner right there and he demonstrated empirically
Thorndike's Law of Effect. Old Ed Thorndike said organisms tend to repeat responses
that leave to positive outcomes but they don't tend to repeat
responses that lead to negative or neutral outcomes. And that sounds like "duh, come on"
that's common sense right?
Sure, it does seem that way, but it was common sense that the Sun went around
the earth
for the longest of times, right, until we got data
to show pretty convincingly that that's not the case.
So you need the same kind of data to prove that it is the case. In this case
that's right. But the ways in which you break that down and pull it apart
gave us some valuable insights into understanding things like absenteeism
At work - why are people here on some days and not on other days right?
Why people might engage in illegal activities when clearly they're not to
their best interests or don't appear to be
to other members of society. Why people raise children in certain ways in one family
and in other ways in another family. Things that are actually very important
to us as human beings can be better understood through breaking down the
behavioral
laws that we would say he came up with or behavioral theories.
Very controversial theorist as he illustrated
that behavior is governed by external stimuli; free will to him is an allusion
and so for him you're really looking at
positive and negative reinforcement and positive and negative punishment,
learning experiences that start when you're a child that accumulate over your
entire lifetime
so that we can predict with fair accuracy on an individual basis
whether somebody's going to go to a class or not go to a class on any given day
based on their learning history. Where they feel like it was a choice that they
did or they didn't on that given day,
Skinner would say it was probably just part of their learning history that
could predict pretty easily
the probability whether they would or wouldn't go to class on a certain day.
So instead of just picking apart people character-alogically, he looked at the
behavior and how it functioned in the environment
to better understand human motivation. That again
bothers some people.