More Menu

4 Psychological Approaches. Explained.

byPosted at

According to psychological perspectives, there are numerous emotional issues that are unrelated to any organic disorders. In order to understand and treat abnormality, these approaches place a strong emphasis on psychological, interpersonal, social, and cultural factors.

4 Psychological Approaches.

  1. Early Psychological Approaches 
  2. Psychoanalytical Approaches
  3. Humanistic Approach 
  4. Behaviors Approach 

1-Early Psychological Approachesa

The moral and mental hygiene movement, which promoted compassionate and responsible treatment of the institutionalized patients and encouraged and reinforced social interaction with them, served as the foundation for psychological approaches. Moral therapy was the foundational idea behind the mental hygiene movement. P. Pinel (1745–1826), William Tuke (1732–22), Benjamin Rush (1745–1813), and Dorothea Dix were pioneers in the field of mental reform (1802-1887). These people were all leaders in the mental hygiene movement, which brought about changes to asylum policies in both Europe and America.

The mentally ill and mentally retarded, also known as "lunatics" and "idiots," received only minimal attention and care in medieval Europe. It was believed that the family, not the community or the state, was responsible for handling disruptive behavior. The first "insane asylums" were built in the 1600s and 1700s. Early asylums were little more than human warehouses, but the moral treatment movement helped improve conditions in at least some mental hospitals as the nineteenth century got underway. Leading mental health professionals of the time launched moral treatment reform initiatives, which were based on a fundamental respect for human dignity and the conviction that humanistic care would help to alleviate mental illness.

By the middle of the 1800s, doctors with experience treating patients with severe mental illnesses were almost always the superintendents of insane asylums. The American Psychiatric Association (APA), later known as the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane (AMSAII), was founded in 1844. In Worcester, Massachusetts, the state of Massachusetts established a public-funded asylum for those with mental illnesses in 1833. First superintendent of the asylum and founding president of the AMSAII was Samuel Woodward. According to Woodward, mental illnesses are treatable in the same way as other illnesses. Physical and ethical practices were used in combination during treatment at the Worcester Lunatic Hospital.

2-Psychoanalytic Approach

Sigmund Freud was a pioneer of psychoanalysis (1856-1939). He acquired his hypnosis skills in France. He experimented with a few different hypnosis techniques. He employed hypnosis in a novel way. He urged his patients to be open and honest about their issues, conflicts, and anxieties. He used Freudian slips, free association, and dream analysis techniques to uncover the unconscious mind and its role in psychopathology. Freud placed a strong emphasis on childhood events and internal mental processes. These are the main components of this strategy:

Analysis of Mental Structures: The human psyche is made up of the id, ego, and super ego. Intra-psychic conflict refers to the state in which the thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors of the three are at odds with one another. The unstructured reservoir of desires or passions connected to our sexual and aggressive drives is known as the Id. It pursues instant gratification while ignoring the needs of reality, order, logic, and reason. The Id operates on the pleasure principle because it acts like a child and wants things right away, regardless of the consequences. Libido is the name for the energy that resides within the Id.

  1. The Id has a distinct cognitive style known as the primary process that it uses to process information. Id has selfish, emotional immaturity, illogical, and irrational thought patterns.
  2. The Ego ensures that the Iselfish d's and perilous impulses are restrained and that we must find a way to satisfy our basic needs without offending others
  3. The ego functions in accordance with the reality principle, and its cognitive processes—often referred to as the secondary process—are marked by logic and reason.
  4. Within the allowed parameters of the super ego, the ego attempts to reconcile conflicts between the demands of the Id.
  5. According to the world's realities, the Ego's role is to mediate disputes between the Id and the Super ego. If it succeeds in mediating, we see a person who is well adjusted, but if it fails, either the Id or the Super ego grows stronger.
Levels of Consciousness: The three levels of consciousness that Freud identified are conscious, preconscious/subconscious, and unconscious. Freud claimed that consciousness is the area of the mind that we are aware of. The ego lives there, but it only makes up a small portion of mental life. The preconscious is made up of ideas or actions that can be quickly brought to mind by making an effort to remember. The Id, which makes up the largest portion of the unconscious and is difficult to access, influences our behavior and gives rise to important needs. At each of the three levels of consciousness, the super ego resides. Levels of consciousness describe the Freudian topographical structure of personality along with the mental structure.
  1. Conscious, preconscious/subconscious, and unconscious are the three levels of consciousness that Freud distinguished. Freud claimed that consciousness is the area of the mind that we are aware of. The ego lives there, but it only makes up a small portion of mental life. The preconscious is made up of ideas or actions that can be quickly brought to mind by making an effort to remember. The Id, which makes up the largest portion of the unconscious and is difficult to access, influences our behavior and gives rise to important needs. At each of the three levels of consciousness, the super ego resides. Levels of consciousness describe the Freudian topographical structure of personality along with the mental structure.
Stages of Psychosexual Development:
According to Freud's theory, there are several stages of psychosexual development that occur during childhood. A lack of or excessive satisfaction of a need at any stage of development leaves a lasting impression on the person in the form of a fixation or psychopathology that is reflected throughout adulthood. Each stage of development represents a particular period of development where our basic needs arise. The libido, or sexual energy, is located in various body parts during each of these stages.
  1. Oral Stage (Birth to 2 Years): During the oral stage, the infant's mouth serves as their primary source of pleasure as they sucker and bite. Any fixations at this stage take the form of nail biting, chewing pencils, paper, etc., or smoking cigarettes.
  2. Anal Stage (2 to 3 Years): Toilet training starts during the anal stage, which lasts for two to three years. Any conflict or fixation at this point manifests as a person who is extremely orderly, tidy, and strict about adhering to norms.
  3. Phallic Stage (3–5 Years): The phallic stage lasts from three to five years. Boys in this stage of development have an oedipal complex, a desire for a sexual attachment to their mothers, while girls move away from their mothers and become more close to their fathers, a phenomenon known as an electra complex.
  4. Latency (5 to 12 years): During this time, the child is primarily focused on developing their social, academic, and professional skills. Sexual urges have subsided.
  5. Genital (12 years and older): Interest in sexual drive decreases during the latency stage, but it increases during the genital stage as the desire to impress the opposite sex grows. Making a good impression on people of the opposite sex through one's appearance, attire, and conversation is more important. You frequently see young people in their formative years focusing on how to look even better in front of the mirror. Each developmental stage is crucial for healthy adjustment, and fixation at any point can lead to the development of psychopathology or an immediate behavior.
Anxiety and Defense Mechanisms: 
Freud observed that reducing tension is a major motivation for most people, and that anxiety is a major contributor to tension. He distinguished three types of anxiety.
    The most fundamental type of anxiety, reality anxiety is frequently based on worries about actual or hypothetical events, like getting bit by a dog or falling off a ladder.
      The most typical remedy for Reality Anxiety is to remove oneself from the situation, flee from the dog, or simply refuse to climb the ladder.Neurotic Anxiety: This type of anxiety results from an unconscious fear that the Id, the most primal aspect of our personality, will take control and punish the person as a result (this is a form of Moral Anxiety).
      Moral anxiety manifests as feelings of guilt or shame and stems from a fear of transgressing moral standards.

      The potential for the aggressive, d's sexually irrational, and antisocial drives to manifest is always a threat to the ego. As a result, the ego struggles to hold off the super ego and id. The tension created by the battles between the id and super ego endangers the ego. the fear or apprehension felt All defense mechanisms have two things in common: they frequently manifest unintentionally, and they frequently falsify reality in some way. When reality is distorted, there is a shift in perception that causes anxiety to lessen and tension to feel less tight. On Freud's list of fundamental defense mechanisms are
      • Denial: claiming/believing that what is true to be actually false.
      • Displacement is the act of directing feelings toward a different object.
      • Intellectualization is the process of adopting objectivity.
      • Projecting means attributing unpleasant feelings to other people.
      • Rationalization: creating false but credible justifications.
      • Reaction Formation: acting excessively in the opposite direction of the fear.
      • Regression is acting childlike once more.
      • Repression is the act of burying unpleasant thoughts in the subconscious.
      • Sublimation is the conversion of undesirable urges into actions that are acceptable in society.
      Psychoanalytic Therapy: 
      Reliving repressed fantasies and fears in both feeling and thought is a component of psychoanalytic therapy. In this process, attitudes and feelings that were originally directed at the parents are projected onto the analyst. For the treatment to be successful, this is required. Through dream interpretation, where the manifest content of dreams is perceived as a symbolic expression of the hidden or latent content, one can frequently gain access to these suppressed fears.
      (Internal censorship requires the wish to be altered, resulting in a masked or symbolic representation.) The sources of dream content are repressed feelings, linguistic symbols, and forgotten memories.
      Dreams are “guardians of sleep”, i.e. wish fulfilments that arise in response to inner conflicts and tensions whose function is to allow the subject to continue sleeping. 

      Dream –Work is the production of dreams during sleep- the translation of demands arising from the unconscious into symbolic objects of the preconscious and eventually the conscious mind of the subject. Dream Interpretation is the decoding of the symbols (manifest content) and the recovery of their latent content, i.e. the unconscious and, hence, hidden tensions and conflicts that give rise to the dreams in the first place. 

      3- Humanistic Approach
      The humanistic perspective emphasizes the good things about life, individual freedom, and growth opportunities. This method contends that refusal to take accountability for one's own words and actions leads to abnormality. Thus, the voluntary decisions we make shape human behavior. Humanistic theorists believe that people are inherently good and that society, not an individual, is to blame for abnormal or aggressive behavior.

      Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow rejected the deterministic nature of behaviorism and psychoanalysis and argued that how we perceive our circumstances determines how we act. We are the best experts on ourselves because no one else can understand how we perceive things. However, unlike Freud, Rogers believed that we have a remarkable capacity for self-healing and personal growth that leads to self-actualization. Like Freud, Rogers developed his theory based on his work with emotionally troubled people. In contrast to Rogers, who placed emphasis on an individual's current perception and how they choose to live in the present, Freud emphasized the significance of psychological continuity and thus believed that our past was a significant predictor of the present.

      4- Behavioral Approach

      The behavioral perspective is associated with American psychologist John B. Watson (1878–1958), the founder of behaviorism, and Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), who discovered the conditioned reflex. The behavioral perspective is concerned with how learning contributes to the understanding of both normal and abnormal behavior.
      When viewed from the perspective of learning, abnormal behavior is the acquisition or learning of unsuitable, maladaptive behaviors. The issue, as seen from a learning perspective, is the abnormal behavior itself. This viewpoint holds that both normal and abnormal behavior can be learned. Why do some people act in an odd way?
      They may have had different educational experiences than other people. For instance, a person who received severe punishment for masturbating as a child may experience anxiety as an adult.

      Reference 
      1. Barlow, D. H., & Durand, V. M. (2005). Abnormal Psychology: An Integrative Approach (4th ed). Belmont, CA: Thomson-Wadsworth.
      2. Carson, R. C., Butcher, J. N., & Mineka, S. (2002). Clinical assessment and treatment. In Fundamentals of Abnormal Psychology and Modern Life. New York: Allyn & Bacon
      3. Staddon, J.E.R. & Cerutti, D. T. (2003). Operant conditioning, Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 115-144.
      4. B. F. Skinner (1938). The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis.
      5. Cambridge, Massachusetts: B. F. Skinner Foundation.
      6. Watson, J.B. & Rayner, R. (1920). Conditioned emotional reactions. Journal of
      7. Experimental Psychology, 3, 1, 1–14.

      Post a Comment
      Tag
      SocialWorkin Qualified Team Member

      Comments

      Thank You