Psychodynamic Approach To Psychology

The psychodynamic approach to psychology is the one people think of most when they hear the word “therapy”. People envision one lying on a couch, speaking their deepest darkest secrets aloud to their therapist. Well, kind of. The psychodynamic approach is quite simple, it relies on the three stages of consciousness: the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious. The conscious mind includes anything we are aware of. What we had for dinner last night, what our favorite movie is, the easy stuff. The preconscious includes emotions and information we have easy access to if we try hard enough to remember, but nothing we need in that exact moment. For example, what was the first street you lived on as a child? It takes a bit of effort to remember, …show more content…
Psychologists favoring this approach believe that human behavior is a science, and anything that cannot be seen is not worth studying. We cannot see the conscious, the mind or the ID, but we can see how people react to certain stimuli. The psychologist assumes that these reactions represent learned habits, and from there they attempt to enforce or unlearn such behaviors. Ivan Pavlov was the first to find names and reasons for these reactions. Pavlov thought that all human behavior was due to the mechanisms of classical conditioning. One has two methods of reaction, unconditioned and conditioned reflexes. Unconditioned reflexes appear when one is born, there is no teaching required. Some examples include jumping at a loud noise, sweating when it’s hot outside, things that are automatic to humans. The unconditioned stimulus is the thing causing these reactions. In these situations, the unconditioned stimulus would be the loud noise and the heat. On the flip side, conditioned reflexes are things that are learned. They become automatic to the person, but they learned this reaction though experience. For example, say a car runs a red light and hits you at an intersection while you’re on your way to work. Now, every time you approach that same intersection your heart rate increases and your hands sweat. Before the accident, you thought nothing of it. But, through experience you now are conditioned to fear this intersection, therefore turning the intersection from a neutral stimulus into a conditioned stimulus. Pavlov discovered this theory through his salivating dog experiment. Pavlov was studying the digestive system of dogs when he realized that they began to salivate every time someone in a lab coat approached them. He assumed this to be because the dogs were fed by assistants in lab coats, so the dogs began to associate the lab