Discussion responses
Guided Response: Review several of your colleagues’ posts and respond substantively to at least two of your peers who were assigned different theorists than you by 11:59 p.m. on Day 7 of the week. You are encouraged to post your required replies earlier in the week to promote more meaningful interactive discourse in this discussion.
Read the assigned articles on those theorists before constructing your reply and compare the contributions of your peer’s theorist with the contributions of yours.
Were the theories complementary, or did they exist in conflict?
Provide specific examples of divergence between the theories as described.
Were there associated issues and/or cultural considerations your classmate did not mention that should have been included in his or her initial post?
What ethical consideration(s) should have been included?
Student one:Jessica Mahaffey
The theorist that I was given to discuss is Wilhelm Reich. Wilhelm Reich turned out to be one of Freud’s most intelligent students which he had based on the theoretical ideas of Psychoanalytic theory. Wilhelm Reich’s work was often associated with the links of sexuality and politics that before long a lot of his work and writing became unavailable due to the communist parties. Reich lived in Germany for a good amount of time, but then he fled to Denmark, Sweden, as well as going back to Berlin, Germany for a short period of time. Through his travels he settled in Norway for a period of time.
Throughout Reich’s presence he was by many government agencies such as FBI, FDA and the INS. The FDA attacked Reich due to their thought of medical fraud occurring and the attacks launched by the FBI and INS were due to sexuality and politics. As time went on there was also a confusion between two names of the same person William Reich and Wilhelm Reich. Wilhelm Reich never changed his name to William Reich but when in the United States this is what he was referred to due to Wilhelm coming from the German given name (Bennett,2010).
In the APA code of conduct it is outlined in Section 9 that “Despite reasonable efforts, such an examination is not practical, psychologists document the efforts they made and the result of those efforts, clarify the probable impact of their limited information on the reliability and validity of their opinions, and appropriately limit the nature and extent of their conclusions or recommendations”(APA,2010).
References:
American Psychological Association. (2010). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct: Including 2010 amendments (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx
Bennett, P. W. (2010). The persecution of Dr. Wilhelm Reich by the government of the United States. International Forum Of Psychoanalysis, 19(1), 51-65. doi:10.1080/08037060903095366
Sletvold, J. (2011). ‘The Reading of Emotional Expression’: Wilhelm Reich and the History of Embodied Analysis. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 21(4), 453-467. doi:10.1080/10481885.2011.595337
Student two:Jared Byas
The psycho-dynamic approach includes theories that view human functioning as a result of internal drives and forces, particularly the conscious/unconscious mind (a theory by Freud), and personality structures. The unconscious mind was definitely a main focus in Freud’s work and was a major contribution into psycho-dynamics. Freud described the unconscious mind a collection of thoughts, feelings and urges that gather outside of our conscious awareness. From this, Freud furthered his thinking, and developed a 3 part human psyche; a visual that can be depicted form an iceberg with the idea that we are “only aware of a small amount of our mind’s activities and that most of it remains hidden from us in our unconscious”.
Freud professed that Even though this information is “hidden” it still affects what we do, and how we act. Our behaviors are carried out through what Freud labeled as our levels on consciousness; the ID- control the instinctive and primitive components of personality, Ego- decision making part of personality, controlled by reason, the most balanced, and Superego- incorporates the values and morals of society which are learned from one’s parents and others (McLeod, 1970). In order for a person to have a healthy personality it is key that have balance of the 3 levels, as we get older and development continues we (sometimes) learn to control our behavioral impulses, cope with certain things in life, and control what we what say. Freud believed that personality and this balance starts with early childhood: Childhood experiences shape our personalities as well as our behavior as adults. He believed that we develop through a series of stages during childhood age 0 up until 12+. Each of us must go through these stages, but if we do not have the proper care and parenting during a stage, it messes up the process, we will be stuck in that stage, even as adults.
When Freud’s research became more public and popular Freud got the opportunity to see many clients, his psycho-dynamic research was informative and was backed by his own theoretical findings. He played the role of therapist or counselor, most popularly psychologist. His methods of observational findings can be seen in the counseling process today but started with his most popular case Little Hans. He witnessed a horrible accident in which a horse carrying a fully loaded cart collapsed in the street. Five-year-old Little Hans developed a fear of horses and then began to resist leaving the house out of fear of seeing the animals. Freud would receive notes from his father describing behaviors that were going on with little Hans such as when he started to have intense interest in his genitals, Freud used his psycho-sexual development do describe Hans as going through the phallic stage. Through listening to Hans speak about fantasies he was having Freud was able to pinpoint what was going on with Hans. Freud wrote that, Little Hans described a fantasy in which a giraffe and another crumpled giraffe enter a room. When the boy took the latter from the first giraffe, it objected. Freud believed that the giraffes symbolized his parents – the crumpled giraffe represented his mother, whom he would share a bed with when his father was absent, and the first giraffe was symbolic of his father. Freud would continue to use this method of focusing on (unconscious) repressed memories, dreams, and fantasies of his clients to explain their conscious behaviors.
In terms of following APA code of conduct, I did not find any unethical practices in Freud’s work with personality. I instead found that Freud was very forthcoming and honest in his work and can be viewed as an early standard of how to conduct observational research and connect it with research. In his research of personality with Little Hans he used observation and interviews to develop his findings, which is typical of what goes on during sessions with clients in today’s time. Only issue or concern I had was that Freud did not have more help with his research there was not a lot of numbers or things to measure so his work was simply based off of his opinion, which can be and bad.
Resources
Hoffman, L. (2010). One hundred years after Sigmund Freud’s lectures in America: towards and integration of psychoanalytic theories and techniques within psychiatry. History of Psychiatry, 21(4), 455-470. doi: 10.1177/0957154X09338081 retrieved from the Sage Journals database.
Lumen, J. (2007, January). Introduction to Psychology. Retrieved from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wsu-sandbox/chapter/freud-and-the-psychodynamic-perspective/ Links to an external site.
McLeod, Saul. “The Unconscious Mind.” Simply Psychology, Simply Psychology, 1 Jan. 1970, www.simplypsychology.org/unconscious-mind.html.
