Jess, Gonzales
PSY/310
January 26, 2015
Jessica Holzer
Psychoanalytic Model
Psychoanalysis is the observations of individuals are unaware of factors that determine their behaviors and emotions. This paper will discuss the foundation and components of psychoanalysis. Also this paper will cover the contributions as well as criticism of the psychoanalytic models of explaining human behavior.
Psychoanalysis focuses on the unconscious, which during the beginning was a subject ignored by other systems of thought. The foundation of psychoanalysis has many contributors and goes back as far as the eighteenth century. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716) was a German philosopher and mathematician that developed the idea called monadology. Leibnitz’s idea was the psychics are elements of reality and not made up of physical matter, which are mental in nature. Leibnitz believed that mental events which are composed if monads had a different degree of consciousness and were called petites perceptions (Schultz, 2011).
Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) also a German philosopher had refined Leibnitz’s theory of the unconscious to the concept of the threshold of consciousness. Arguing that ideas in the mind rise to the conscious level of awareness. So in order for these ideas to rise to a conscious level of awareness it must be already relevant in the minds consciousness (Schultz, 2011). At the same time incongruous ideas cannot exist in the minds conscious. Herbart believed conflicts arise among ideas, as they become conscious realizations.
Gustav Fechner (1801-1887) was a philosopher, physicist and experimental psychologist. Although he used the threshold theory Fechner proposed the analogy of the iceberg in which much of the mind lies below the surface that influence the unobservable force. This idea had a great impact on Freud and his work. Freud quoted form Fechner’s Elements of Psychophysics in several of his books and derived major concepts
References: Freud, S. (1949). An outline of psychoanalysis. New York: Norton. Greenberg, R. P. (1986). The case against Freud 's cases. Behavioral and Brain Sciences Grunbaum, A. (1986). Précis of The foundations of psychoanalysis: A philosophical critique. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 9, 217-284. Schultz, D. P. (2011). a History of Modern Psychology (10th ed.). : Cengage Learning