Psychodynamics

Psychodynamics is an approach to mental health emphasizing the dynamic forces of the human mind. It can refer to either a broad family of approaches associated with the classical psychoanalytic teachings of Viennese physician Sigmund Freud or to a particular approach to mental therapy: psychodynamic psychotherapy. Unlike behavioral approaches, psychodynamics tries to understand the mind from the inside rather than focusing exclusively on what people do. Unlike cognitive approaches, psychodynamics focuses on drives which the patient may not even be aware of, rather than their conscious thoughts. Many of the conflicts of the unconscious mind are thought to originate in childhood experiences, and psychodynamic practitioners tend to see childhood, and particularly early childhood, as the most important period in establishing the psychology of the individual.

Psychodynamics was influenced by the nineteenth-century science of thermodynamics and its association with industry. Psychodynamics’s emphasis on drives, repression, and how drives will eventually manifest themselves despite repression, has resulted in its being dismissively referred to by some of its critics as the "hydraulic model" of the human mind.

Brief History

The psychodynamic approach began with Freud, although elements of it can be found in earlier writers such as the German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, the German physician and physiologist Ernst Wilhelm Ritter von Brücke, and the American psychologist William James. Psychological medicine in the late nineteenth century was concerned with the classification and treatment of mental conditions without much concern as to their causes. Freud broke with this tradition by being more concerned with the causes of psychological problems, at first using hypnosis to get past the patient’s defenses. Later, Freud abandoned hypnosis, seeing it as unnecessary.

Central to Freud’s mature method was the so-called talking cure, in which the patient spent hours talking to the analyst about his or her life and thoughts, particularly in childhood. The couch on which such a patient reclined while talking even became a symbol of psychoanalysis itself. Ideally, the patient would "free associate," saying whatever came into their minds rather than being directed by the therapist. The goal of the talking cure was for the analyst to understand the inner workings of the patient’s mind to alleviate their mental problems. Freud developed a complex theory of the human mind which placed great emphasis on sexual drives and the stages of sexual development. The emphasis on sexuality and the acceptance of desires that society considered "perverse" in Freudian analysis made it shocking and controversial in some circles. Aggressive drives were also important for Freud, and some of his later work sees civilization as a whole as driven by the conflict of the sexual "life drive" and the "death drive." Drives could be contained, repressed, or redirected. Much of the task of the psychoanalyst lay in making patients aware of how their drives had shaped their lives, and in doing so learn to control and direct them in productive ways.

Psychoanalysis became massively influential in the 1920s, as it was a fad in some American and European circles to be in analysis. The influence of psychoanalytic thought spread well beyond therapeutics, however, to literature and art and even religion. Freud gathered a group of disciples, many of whom parted from Freud’s teachings to found psychodynamic schools of their own. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung founded analytical psychology, incorporating ideas of archetypes and the collective unconscious while moving away from Freud’s central emphasis on sexuality. The Austrian Alfred Adler’s individual psychology placed greater emphasis on external factors and the patient’s reaction to them, including the "inferiority complex." Otto Rank supported a closer emotional relationship between the analyst and the patient, as opposed to Freud’s belief that the analyst should be emotionally detached. Another Austrian, Wilhelm Reich, synthesized Freudian psychodynamics and Marxism.

The founding of new trends in psychodynamic thought continued through the twentieth century. An Austrian who spent most of her professional career in London, Melanie Klein was a founder of the object relations school, which emphasizes relationships with other people during childhood rather than drives.

Topic Today

Psychodynamic psychotherapy is a school of therapy that adapts the talking-cure method of psychoanalysis but with fewer meetings—one or two a week as opposed to three to five—and a generally less intensive approach. Psychodynamic therapists are also more likely to concentrate on a specific issue rather than allow a number of issues to emerge from a patient’s free associations in the manner of classical psychoanalysts.

Psychodynamic approaches to mental health, including psychoanalysis, are increasingly under fire from more materialistic ways of understanding and treating mental conditions, including neuroscience and drug treatments. The model of the brain as a computer is displacing the psychodynamic model of the brain as moved by physical forces and drives. The psychodynamic model is also criticized as being unscientific for relying on the existence of forces and drives that cannot be proved to exist. The growing sophistication of neuroscience has produced a map of the brain which shares few common features with most psychodynamic maps of the mind, and problems such as depression are increasingly seen as physiological rather than purely mental states. Freudian psychoanalysis in particular has also undergone stringent criticism from feminists, who claim that it emerged from and reinforced a patriarchal and misogynist culture.

Bibliography:

Ammaniti, Massimo, and Vittorio Gallese. The Birth of Intersubjectivity: Psychodynamics, Neurobiology, and the Self. Norton, 2014.

Bob, Petr. "Psychodynamics as ‘Thermodynamics’ of Mind." The Brain and Conscious Unity: Freud’s Omega. Springer, 2015. 1–30.

Elliott, Anthony. Subject to Ourselves: An Introduction to Freud, Psychoanalysis, and Social Theory. Routledge, 2015.

Erdelyi, Matthew H. "Psychodynamics and the Unconscious." American Psychologist 47.6 (1992): 784–87.

Horowitz, Mardi J. Introduction to Psychodynamics: A New Synthesis. Basic Books, 1988.

Malan, David. Individual Psychotherapy and the Science of Psychodynamics. Butterworth-Heinemann, 1995.

"Psychodynamic Therapy." Psychology Today, www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapy-types/psychodynamic-therapy. Accessed 27 Aug. 2024.

Rayner, Eric, et al. Human Development: An Introduction to the Psychodynamics of Growth, Maturity and Ageing. 4th ed. Routledge, 2005.

Wachtel, Paul L. Cyclical Psychodynamics and the Contextual Self: The Inner World, the Intimate World, and the World of Culture and Society. Routledge, 2014.