Paper Topic:

Psychoanalysis

Question 1

Behaviorism had the greatest influence on scientific psychology . Its founder , John B . Watson , reacted against the tradition of his time-that conscious experience was the province of psychology and boldly proclaimed a psychology without introspection (Hilgard , 1989 . Watson made no assertions about consciousness when he studied the behavior of animals and infants . He decided not only that the results of animal psychology and child psychology could stand on their own as a science but also that they set a pattern that adult psychology might well follow . In to make psychology

a science , Watson said psychological data must be open to public inspection like the data of any other science . Behavior is public , consciousness is private . Because psychologists were growing impatient with introspection the new behaviorism caught on rapidly particularly in the 1920 's . In Russia the work of Ivan Pavlov on the conditioned response was regarded as an important area of research by the behaviorists . Watson argued that nearly all behavior is the result of conditioning and that environment shapes our behavior by reinforcing specific habits (Hilgard , 1989 . The conditioned response was viewed as the smallest indivisible unit of behavior and atom of behavior from which more complicated behaviors could be built . All types of complex behavioral repertoires arising from special training or education were regarded as nothing more than an interlinked fabric of conditioned responses . Behaviorists found it congenial to discuss psychological phenomena as beginning with a stimulus and ending with a response -giving rise to the term stimulus-response psychology . Classical behaviorism in this aspect has been called as conservative and it assumed a myopic view of human nature

Freud 's psychoanalysis is also a system of thought that proposed a constricted definition of human nature it postulated that the unconscious mind is the seat of man 's psyche and that the mind is ruled by the id , ego and superego , and an individual develops according to the psychosexual stages . Like classical behaviorism , Freud 's psychoanalysis did not sit well with the academic circles because it was heavily laden with sexual notions it was as if , every problem experienced by the individual was caused by repressed sexual urges . Although , Freud 's psychoanalysis was criticized severely , many did still found its concepts useful and somehow struck the truth in some places (Hilgard 1989 . Many of Freud 's students took his major tenets and developed their own theories within the psychoanalytic tradition . This new breed of psychoanalytic theorists was referred to as post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory . The assumptions of the post-Freudian group significantly improved the earlier assumptions of Freud of which gave greater emphasis to the role of the ego as its own master , with its own energy and motives . Then , the new group stressed the importance of non-instinctual determinants of behavior like the individual 's social environment and immediate circle . The group also added new variables in the study of the development of personality as well as conducting scientific studies and involved the direct observation of infants as opposed...

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