Evaluate The Biological Approach

The biological approach has shown to be one of the most scientific perspectives in psychology. When explaining human behaviour, the biological approach focuses on the role of genes, inheritance and biological processes, claiming that these are the things which determine behaviour. Additionally, the nervous system also plays an important role in explaining human behaviour.
The biological approach arose out of attempts to understand two major issues: the relationship between the mind and body, and the influence of heredity on behaviour. In the seventeenth century, many people believed that the body was controlled by the ‘soul’ and among the people who believed this was René Descartes, a French philosopher. He felt that the human body was similar
However unlike animals, he also believed that humans had a soul and that this, and the physical body, could interact with each other through the pineal gland located in the brain. As the French word “l’âme” can be used for both mind and soul, Descartes’ idea was interpreted as referring to the relationship between mind and body. His view that the mind and body were distinct, but could still interact with each other, became known as dualism. However, psychologists today reject the idea of dualism as they believe that the mind and body are a single entity which is equivalent to the idea of materialism (assuming that all behaviour has a physiological basis). In 1861, Paul Broca, provided evidence of functional localisation in the brain. Louis Victor Leborgne (Tan) lost his ability to speak due to a head injury and was only able to pronounce the syllable “tan” hence why people referred to him as Tan. Although his ability to speak had dramatically been affected, Tan showed no signs of physical or cognitive trauma. When he died years later, Broca carried out an autopsy which lead him to
Psychoanalysis was the first psychodynamic theory, proposed by Freud which is based on the assumption that everyone has a conscious mind and an unconscious mind, and that it is the feelings and memories that are kept in our unconscious mind which determines our behaviour. This can be regarded as psychic determinism. During his early work, Freud began treating patients with hysteria – a disorder characterised by physical symptoms for which there is no apparent physical cause. After working with the likes of Charcot and Breuer, Freud came to the conclusion that recalling traumatic events produced a release of emotional tension known as catharsis. This then led him to develop a technique called free association which involves patients expressing their thoughts exactly how they occur, regardless of how unimportant they may seem, and then looking for any patterns that may occur. Freud claimed that these patterns represented forgotten events and that the memory of these events had been repressed. This discovery is what led to Freud’s proposal that awareness can be divided into the conscious, subconscious, preconscious and unconscious. Thoughts and feelings that we are constantly aware of are part of the conscious mind. The preconscious and unconscious are divisions of the subconscious. We can access memories that are part of the preconscious by choice, for example, recalling what