Summary of the Perspective

​HancockPrinciples of the Psychodynamic perspective

• Behaviour is influenced by the interaction (dynamism) of drives and forces within the personality (psyche).
• Behaviour comes from the unconscious personality.
• Personality is shaped by relationships, experience and conflict over time, particularly during childhood.
• The mind is like an iceberg. It has conscious, subconscious and unconscious thought, all of which can influence our behaviour

 
Types of Behaviour Studied

• What do your actions say about your unconscious personality?
• What do your actions say about your childhood?

 
Practical Applications

• Issues of Mental Health – using psychoanalysis to uncover unconscious conflicts
• Child Psychology – when should you stop being a daddy’s girl or mummy’s boy?
• Criminal Psychology – is crime due to having too much of a naughty side?

 
Debate it strongly links with
It takes the determinist side of the free will / determinism debate as it believes that behaviour is caused and determined by the unconscious mind.
 
Strengths

• Allows psychologists suggest causes of mental disorders
• Allows psychologists to suggest why individuals behave in ways they cannot easily explain or understand.
• Uses case studies providing rich, detailed data

 
Weaknesses

• Studies often use unrepresentative samples
• Research Methods may not be objective and are open to bias.
• The perspective is based on concepts that are difficult to test and verify scientifically.

 
Research Methods

• Use of case studies open to subjectivity affecting validity
• Case studies difficult to replicate so issues with reliability of findings

 
Methodological Issues

• Allows both qualitative and quantitative data to be gathered which provides rich, in-depth data about the behaviour under consideration.
• Methods can be longitudinal showing development of behaviour
• Longitudinal research can suffer from attrition of participants

 
Core Studies

• Freud
• Hancock
• Kohlberg​