Sigmund Freud's Psychodynamic Approach

The psychodynamic approach was established by Sigmund Freud, a neurobiologist who later studied the psychology of the mind. The psychodynamic approach was founded around the fact that mental disorders occurring from emotional issues in the unconscious of our mind, which Freud believed derived from childhood experiences (the relationship the patient had with their parents as this would determine their mental capabilities.) The unconscious mind was described through an iceberg analogy. The iceberg analogy shows; the top of the iceberg (shown above sea level) representing the conscious which was believed to be based around the mental abilities all humans can access at any time for example perceptions; the preconscious (which rests just below the
Due to events which may occur solely based around someone's childhood the unconscious mind may have certain defences if it was traumatic, in order to protect the mental stability of the person these are known as defence mechanisms, repression is the most common one for traumatic experiences which the ego represses in order to protect the person however, there is evidence to suggest that cue dependency theories have shown to trigger the traumatic event by an action which shows weakness in the repression. Denial is another defence mechanism (similar to the five stages of grief) denial blocking the event from the mind denying it ever happened similar to this is projection, which believes that certain behaviours are unacceptable, so push the behaviour onto another person for example hating someone is not acceptable so believe person hates them instead. Next is displacement which is when satisfying a whim by replacing it with a proxy (this can be aggression or pain etc.) defence mechanisms can also be present during the psychosexual stages of development. The psychosexual stages of development are Oral, anal, latent, phallic and