Outline and evaluate the psychodynamic approach to abnormality The psychodynamic approach assumes that experiences in our earliest years can affect our emotions, attitudes and behaviour in later years without us being aware that it is happening. Freud suggested the mind or psyche has three parts: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. Freud suggested that individuals can never be aware of the contents of the unconscious. Freud argued that childhood experiences play a crucial part in adult development, including the development of adult personality. Every child must pass through the so-called psycho-sexual stages; how a child experiences these stages plays a crucial role in the development of his/her personality.
Bowlby put forward the principle of monotropy, believing that the infant displays a strong innate tendency to form an attachment with one significant person, not necessarily, but usually the mother. (Gross, R. 2005). This was criticised by Rutter (1981), who claimed that the mother is not special in the way that the infant shows its attachment, as children will show a whole range of attachment behaviours towards a variety of people. Bowlby (1969), cited in Martin et al 2007 p. 546) claimed that the most important attachment behaviours are sucking, cuddling, looking, smiling and crying. According to Freud the newborn infant lives in a solipsistic world of ‘primary narcissism’ and experiences a build-up of tension with the need to suck the breast as an expression of his infantile sexuality.
This is one of the oldest theories of psychology in which patients are viewed within a model of illness or "what is lacking." Individuals are seen as being made up from a "dynamic" that begins in early childhood and progresses throughout life. This psychodynamic way of thinking is generally a watered-down offshoot of the more conservative and rigid psychoanalytic school of thought. Psychoanalysis emphasizes that all adult problems' roots can be traced back to one's childhood. This theory tends to look at individuals as the composite of their parental upbringing and how particular conflicts between themselves and their parents and within themselves get worked out.
The lack of emotional care can possibly result in no attachment being formed. It can also result in permanent harm to the infants social and emotional development. The study conducted by Hodges and Tizard (1989) was of ex-institutional children. He aimed to see effects of children who had suffered early privation. He also wanted to test Bowlby's Maternal deprivation (or privation) hypothesis.
(Klein M , 1930 p.238) That is to say, it is a theory that explains why and how childhood experience and relationships affect all relationships in the present. ’From the moment the infant starts interacting with the outer world, he is engaged in testing his phantasies in a reality setting. It wasn’t to suggest that the origin of thought lies in this process of phantasy against reality; that is, that thought is not only contracted with phantasy, but based on it and derived from it.’ (Segal, 1981, p. 45) As
Bowlby proposed that an internal working model (IWM) developed in childhood will determine or affect later adult relationships and how successful they are. Ainsworth’s strange situation helped develop three main types of attachment: secure, resistant and avoidant. Secure children develop a positive model of themselves and relationships as their primary caregiver was sensitive, emotionally responsive and supportive. Resistant children have parents who were inconsistent in their care giving, resulting in the child having a negative image of themself - often seeking attention but not finding comfort when they receive it. Avoidant children often have rejecting parents, which leads to them developing an internal model which makes them think they are unacceptable and unworthy.
Having a caregiving environment of mind-mindedness, a state in which the parents treat their children as independent thinkers, is a necessary condition for the best development of interpersonal interpretive function. Individuals suffering from BPD have an inadequate ability to understand that their reactions and other’s reactions are driven by thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires. Attachment trauma is also thought to be part of the history of those with BPD. Attachment theory suggests that early experience with caregivers serves to organize later attachment relationships and has been used to explain the psychopathology of BPD (Fonagy, Target, Gergely, Allen, & Bateman, 2003). Childhood maltreatment studies have offered diverse predictors in the types of childhood maltreatment associated with BPD.
The Developing Child 1) Discuss the differences in theory about the essence of human beings according to John Jacque Rousseau and John Locke and tell what the debate between them came to be called. JR: believed people are born with skills and qualities that make them who they are. JL: babies are blank when being born, we learn only by experience which we are nurtured by others. The debate between this was called nature vs. nurture 2) True or False. Babies are born legally blind.
She developed on Bowlby’s IWM theory by looking at the individual differences on types of attachments that may be formed to the primary care-giver. Ainsworth looked at children’s behaviour during separation from their mothers, beginning in Uganda and a later study in the US Ainsworth developed the strange situation experiment as a standard test to measure attachment in children (Oates, 2005). From her results she discovered three main times of attachment. Secure, insecure (split into sub-categories) and absent (Oates, 2005). The way in which the child behaves during the strange situation is determined by the behaviour the care giver presents to the child.
According to Burlingham and Freud this behavior proved that emotional contact was a powerful, natural drive and also that the “artificial families” institutionalized children formed could never satisfy that drive (Adoption, 2010). Their war work was summarized in Infants Without Families; the book supported evidently general literature on development, and adoption science. The book concluded that residential institutions were not sufficient care for children because they produced abnormal development in them, without the nurture of a mother the inability to attach held lifelong