Sigmund
Freud (Psychoanalytic
Theory) began his career as an ordinary doctor specialising in
neurology. He came across many patients suffering from a disorder called
hysteria, which involved a complex combination of many complaints. There was no
organic cause of these symptoms; they were seen as psychological in origin.
It
was the detailed study of these patients that initiated his work on human
personality and it’s development
Freud believed that hysteria stemmed from unresolved and unconscious sexual conflicts that originated in childhood and that human development would pass through a series of psychosexual stages.
1.
ORAL
The oral stage (0
to 2).
2.
ANAL The
anal stage (2 to
3)
3.
PHALLIC The phallic
stage (3 to 6)
4. LATENT The latent stage (6 to 12)
5. GENITAL
The genital stage (12+) -
According
to Freud, the mind was separated into two parts; the Conscious and the Unconscious,
and that the personality was made up of three structures; the Id,
the Ego and the Superego,
and that a healthy personality must keep all three structures in balance, but in
order to do this, the Ego, which attempts to maintain balance between the Id and
the Superego, would unconsciously use defence mechanisms.
Freud
had many followers who eventually went on to find their own separate and
distinctive approaches. Here are a few:
Carl
Gustav Jung:
(Analytic Theory)
was a Swiss psychiatrist, who at first agreed with Freud, then came to
believe that Freud overemphasised the importance of sexual instincts as a source
of behaviour.
Jung thoughts that non-sexual potentials within the person must be released or neurosis would develop. Jungian theory is known as
Melanie
Klein:
(Object Relations Theory) suggested
that it was the continual introjection
(Introjection being, the process by
which the functions of an external object is taken over by its mental
representation.) and
projection (Projection
being, specific impulses, wish aspects of self are imagined to be located in
same object, external to self) of objects that was responsible for the
development of the Ego. Ego development depended on the introjection of the
mother and breast.
She
attributed greater importance to the first year of life, than to childhood as a
whole.
Donald
W. Winnicott:
like Klein, believed in Object Relations Theory.
As a child psychoanalyst, Winnicott thought that a newborn infant had to develop
a sense of self out of the original state of unintegration. The struggle for the
self centers on the object relation between the mother and the child, and the
emphasis being that the role of the mother is the most important object in the
life of the child. He saw the therapeutic relationship, as being at it’s best
when it mirrored the Good Enough Mothering theory.
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