D
Darwin, Charles (1809-1882).
Born in Shrewsbury, England, Charles Darwin was the 4th of five children of an upper middle class family. His mother (who died when he was 8) was from a family renown for making chinaware (Wedgewood). His father was a physician and wanted Charles to follow in the family business but had little faith in his son’s ultimate success.
Although Darwin attended medical school at the University of Edinburgh, he was not a good student and found operations without anesthesia (which hadn’t yet been discovered) was gruesome. Switching from medicine to the clergy, Darwin transferred to Cambridge, where he spent more time drinking and singing than studying.
In 1831, he graduated from Cambridge but wanted to avoid taking his clergy vows. So at the suggestion of a botanist he met at school, Darwin signed on the HMS Beagle for a 5 year exploration of South American, Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia. Although he was paying his own way, Darwin almost never got to take the trip. The ship’s young skipper, Captain Robert Fitz-Roy, was a phrenologist who (based on the shape of the nose) believed that Darwin was too lazy to be the ship’s naturalist. Despite the captain’s reluctance, Charles was onboard two days after Christmas, 1831, when the Beagle set sail for South America.
Although Darwin collected samples and took notes, he did not immediately write his theory upon his return to England in October of 1836. He had acquired the data but needed an overarching principle to tie his observation together. Darwin found what he needed the following year in an article by Thomas Malthus. An economist, Malthus reasoned that the struggle to succeed in business is the result of resource scarcity. Darwin applied the concept to plants, which grow very rapidly and would overwhelm the Earth if it weren’t for shortages of food, space and other resources. Only the fittest of the offspring survive.
Darwin combined the idea of struggling for survival with Charles Lyell’s dynamic view of the Earth. According to Lyell, the planet is not static but is still in flux. Darwin proposed that the same process of equilibrium is the result of natural forces. Species change by natural selection. Changes in the environment impose circumstances that are conducive for some offspring and unsympathetic for others. Looking over time, changes in species reflect the adaptation needed for the species to survive.
For Darwin, evolution is not a directional or a thoughtful process, it happens as a natural consequence of changes in the environment. Fitness is a function of individual differences and how well they match environmental demands. Changes in a species from one generation to the next are due to the species’ ability to adapt to the environment.
Before Darwin, the world was thought of a series of catastrophes. The last great catastrophic event (Noah’s flood) had wiped out all animals except those on the ark. Darwin’s speculation that related organisms come from common ancestors brought into question the immutability of species and, by extension, the special creation of humans. Darwin’s theory of evolution also replaced Lamarck’s contention that the effects of practice could be seen in one’s offspring. Lamarck’s belief in spontaneous generation was also called into question.
Darwin didn’t invent the concept of evolution. Lamarck and others, including St. Augustine, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Darwin’s grandfather, had alluded to the idea. Darwin brought a tremendous amount of observational data and presented it at time when people were ready to seriously consider the premise. In addition to good data and good timing, Darwin provided an overall rationale for evolution. He noted that diversity helps a species survive. If all members of a species are exactly the same, changes in environment could wipe out the entire species. But with diversity there is a likelihood that some members of the species will be able to function under the new conditions.
In 1839, Darwin married Emma Wedgewood, his first cousin. Darwin’s health was failing and the couple soon moved to Kent (a few miles outside of London) in hopes of improving his condition. Unfortunately, by the time he was forty Darwin was virtually an invalid. Although he still traveled to scientific meetings, Darwin often worked alone at home, surrounded by his 10 children.
In 1842, Darwin wrote a short sketch of his evolution theory and shared it with his friends. In 1844, a longer, unpublished version was created. Then, twenty years after he returned from his trip, Darwin began what he anticipated to be a multi-volume series on the subject of evolution. He was still working on it when the naturalist Alfred Wallace almost stole his thunder in 1858. Wallace sent a copy of an article he had prepared that described a theory of evolution virtually identical to Darwin’s. Together, Darwin and Wallace each presented their papers to the Linnean Society on the same day. The following year, Darwin published his now famous book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.
Although Darwin rarely defended his theory, Thomas Huxley was less constrained. As the primary defender of evolution, Huxley not only argued the merits of the theory but also its implications. Evolution was not merely an unimpassioned collection of data. It was a challenge to the uniqueness of man and the nature of divine intervention.
Descartes, Rene (1596-1660).
Born in La Haye, France, René Descartes came from a wealthy family but was in poor health for most of his life. His mother died with he was very young; his father (a lawyer) traveled a lot) He was raised by his grandmother, together with an older brother and sister.
Educated at the College of La Fleche (a Jesuit school), Descartes believed that God created the universe, set it in motion, and left it alone. He held that since God was not involved in the day to day operations of the universe, it is possible to study the universe and its laws without making theological statements.
Descartes maintained that animals were basically machines but man has a soul. The body operated like the fountain at St. Germain (outside of Pairs) with its mechanical statues. As people walked on the stones near the fountain, they triggered hidden plates under the stones that were attached with strings and levels to valves that released water through tubes that make the statues move. Similarly, the human body has senses that are connected by thin strings to cavities. Pulling on the strings (stimulating a sense) caused the cavities (ventricles) to release gases to flow to the muscles and move the body. The strings are inside of hollow tubes (nerves) and the gasses were thought to be distilled from blood and were called animal spirits (in the same way that drinks which contain distilled alcohol are called distilled spirits). Just as God is a spirit and can travel anywhere instantaneously, animal spirits move animals and travel instantaneously through the hollow nerve tubes.
The eyes were thought to be connected to directly to the pineal gland. Descartes was a dualist (both body and soul exist) and reasoned that the soul and the mind had to meet somewhere. He proposed that the pineal gland (since it has no duplicates) was where the meeting occurred. The eyes send gasses through the nerves to the pinal gland and make an impression of the scene; that’s why the eyes are the “mirror of the soul.”
After Descartes earned his law degree from the University of Poitiers in 1616,. he set off to see the world. He traveled through Brittany, Switzerland and Italy, and served a volunteer solider for Maurice of Nassau, and for the Duke of Bavaria. On November 10, 1619, Descartes had an encounter with God. In a dream, he had a vision that God was going to reveal all knowledge to him. Descartes’ revelation was that all of the different areas of knowledge can be unified by a single method of reasoning. The method that came to him began with a search for absolutes.
To build a unified body of knowledge, one must start with the smallest parts. These building blocks must be the clear, un-doubtable and simple (not composed of other ideas). From this base of absolute knowledge all other knowledge can be deduced. Descartes searched for the smallest parts of knowledge by systematically doubting everything. In 1629, Descartes, living in Holland, came the end of his search. He had doubted everything, even whether he existed. The only idea he couldn’t doubt was that he was thinking. Consequently, his existence could be assured; “I think, therefore I am.”
In contrast to scholasticism (demonstrating the logical validity of truths), Descartes believed his approach allowed the uncovering of truth. Syllogisms were only useful after a discovery has been made (revealed by authority). Descartes rationalism rejected that reliance on authority (since all authority is flawed). His approach, called the Cartesian method, used both intuition and deduction. Intuition is pure reason (understanding an idea directly, not through the senses); deduction uses memory and draws conclusions from a continuous chain of thought (A to B, B to C, etc.).
Although a rationalist (noting the faultiness of sensory perceptions), Descartes accepted both innate ideas and empirical observations. According to Descartes, knowledge of God is innate, supported by reason (perfect ideas can’t come from something imperfect, so they must come from God). Similarly, even though perceptions can be faulty, experiments in physics, biology and physiology provide confirmation of an ideas validity. Ideas must be tested in reality. Indeed, Descartes believed that all of science is a tool for bettering human life; ultimately, theory must be turned into practical applications (e.g., ethics, medicine, mechanics).
Descartes’ discovery of analytic geometry had both theoretical and practical consequences. While lying in bed, he was idly watching a fly in his room. Descartes noticed that he could describe the fly’s location with only 3 numbers (one for each dimension). From a theoretical perspective, this coordinate system integrates geometry and algebra. In practical terms, it allows a mathematical description of planets in their orbits, arrows in flight and people in their environment.
Democritus (460-370 BC)
According to Democritus, nature is composed of tiny particles which are in constant motion. He called these particles atoms and classified them in terms of their size, shape, and angularity. Taste was the result of small, angular winding atoms. Sight was the result of atoms flying through the air, hitting the eye, and making a copy of the original object. Thinking was caused by the fastest, smallest atoms. For Democritus, there is no soul or will; life is reducible to patterns of atomic matter.
Dewey, John (1859-1952).
Born in Burlington, Vermon, John Dewey taught high school before receiving his Ph.D. in philosophy from Johns Hopkins (1884). After teaching at the U of Michigan, U of Minnesota, and the U of Chicago, Dewey spent the last 27 years at Columbia (he retired in 1931). An educational reformer at heart, Dewey’s psychology, like that of William James, emphasized practical functions of the mind. He held that a psychological act can’t be broken into elemental parts. Learning not to touch a hot flame is an entire adaptive function, and is not reducible to its component parts.
Dollard, John (1900-1980) & Miller, Neal (1909-2002).
It was the 1960s, and everyone was interested in self discovery, cross-disciplinary education, and making-love-not-war. In this environment, old theories were explained in new terms, often by adding a social dimension. One such effort at Yale, found John Dollard (anthropologist) and Neal Miller (psychologist) joining forces to explain psychoanalytic principles in more modern terms. The result was Dollard-Miller’s psychoanalytic learning theory.
They combined Sigmund Freud and Clark Hull. Hull maintained that behavior is reinforced by drive reduction. Drives are strong stimuli that produce discomfort (hunger, thirst, etc.). A drive impels us to action when we encounter a cue. You’re already hungry (drive) when you hear your tummy growl (cue). The cue triggers a behavior designed to reduce the drive (get up and go to the kitchen). If you are successful in reducing the drive (you find a bag of cookies), the reduction in hunger reinforces that sequence, making it more likely to happen next time you’re hungry and hear your tummy growl.
Primary reinforcers are events that reduce primary drives (physiological processes). Secondary reinforcers are events that reduce learned drives (acquired drives). That’s why eating a cookie doesn’t make you feel better about being lonely. Cookies can reduce the primary drive of hunger but not the secondary drive of feeling loved.
For Dollard & Miller, learning combines four processes: drive, cue, response and reinforcement. Drive is the engine. The cue tells you when, where and how to respond. Your response is any behavior or sequence of behaviors you perform. And reinforcement is the consequence of drive being reduced. If your behavior isn’t reinforced, that behavior will be extinguished (disappear). But the process doesn’t stop there. You keep trying different responses until one of them satisfies the drive. Like most drive theories, Dollard and Miller don’t explain where the drives come from; they settle for its being a given.
The best way to understand Dollard and Miller is to pretend you are a mouse in a maze. Having run this maze before, you quickly head toward to food but discover that the path you usually take has been blocked. This is Dollard and Miller’s definition of frustration: a blocked attempt to reduce drive. As a mouse, you scratch at the floor, try to climb the maze, bite at the blockage, and rush around in an agitated state. As a human, you do pretty much the same when your goals are blocked. If you lock your keys in the car, you stomp on the ground, yell at the car and pound on its window. All because your goal is blocked.
Frustration can also come from being unable to do two things at once. When the frustration is severe, Dollard and Miller call it conflict. Conflict is having incompatible responses that occur at the same time. It is the inability to respond simply to the drives that have been trigger. Conflict is trying to do two incompatible things at the same time.
There are four types of conflicts. Approach-approach is the choice between two things you like. It is the choice between cake and ice cream. In this situation, you tend to chose whichever is closer. Mice do the same thing. If you’re the mouse and put in the center of a straight maze with food at one end and food at the other end, you go to which ever goal is closer. People choose grocery stores, banks and gas stations this way. Assuming they are about equal value, you choose on the basis of convenience (immediacy of drive reduction).
In approach-avoidance, you’re at one end of a straight maze (no turns). At the other end is both food and electric shock. An experienced mouse runs toward the food but slows down as it gets closer to the food-shock combination. Conflict is wanting your food and avoiding the shock: two incompatible responses.
Let me put it in cognitive terms. This is completely un-Dollard & Miller) but it will help you remember it. You are in a straight maze. From where you are, the food looks pretty good, so you head toward it. But as you get closer to the target, you remember (having been here before) about the shock. The more you think about the shock, the slower you run toward the food. Thinking about the food is an “approach gradient.” The closer you get to a goal, the more exciting it is. Thinking about the shock is an “avoidance gradient.” The closer you get to something you dread, the less exciting it is.
We love approach gradients. Anticipating going to a big event, looking forward to your birthday, or thinking ahead to getting a new car. Remember how excited you were to get your driver’s license? The closer you got to that day, the more excited you were. People underestimate the value of an approach gradient. Children in particular love anticipation. If you want to get your kids excited, don’t surprise them by taking them to Disneyland. About two weeks before the day, tell them you’re going to take them. And then every day, when they ask “Is this the day?,” say “No, but it will be soon.” When the day actually comes, they’ll be super-excited.
The same is true of adults. Adults don’t really like surprise parties either. Surprise parties are the most fun for those putting on the surprise. Most recipients look confused and startled, more than happy and pleased. We look forward to vacation. We look forward to holidays. We love to anticipate events. It’s the approach gradient in us. We also dread visiting relatives, attending meetings and going to the dentist. And the closer we get to negative events, the worse they look. It’s our built-in avoidance gradient.
One of Dollard and Miller’s key principles is that avoidance gradients are steeped than approach gradients. When we’re happy to have a date but sorry we got stuck with a loser, we’re in an approach-avoidance conflict. Blind dates don’t sound too bad from a distance. But the closer we get to the day of the event, the worse it seems. “Why did I ever agree to do this.”
When you back out of something you previously agreed to, your avoidance gradient became steeper than the approach gradient. As long as the avoidance is small (something irritating but not overwhelming) when compared to the approach, we perform the behavior. But when avoidance exceeds approach, we opt out of the situation. We take back the clothes we can’t afford. We try to get out of the car lease we signed the day before. When avoidance is greater than approach, we call off the wedding.
Avoidance-avoidance conflicts occur when we’re stuck between two things we don’t want. Given a choice between a toothache and the dentist stabbing you with a needle, we try to do neither. When given the chose between two political candidates, neither of whom you like, many people choose not to vote. They hover in indecision and opt for “none of the above.” In such conflicts, we tend to choose whichever is the least objectionable. Or we avoid whichever is closer.
Conflicts don’t have to be simple, either. In “double approach-avoidance” conflicts, it is the choice between two ends of the maze, each with its own approach-avoidance conflict. For the mouse, this would be food & shock at one end of the maze, and food & shock at the other end too. The mouse begins running toward one end but slows at it gets closer. It then turns and runs toward the other end, where it slows down, turns and runs back. The mouse spends most of its time running back and forth in the maze, never getting shocked but never reducing its hunger. The human version is similar. It is the choice between going home for Thanksgiving to be with your dysfunctional family and staying where you but being lonely.
Dollard & Miller include unconscious behavior in their model. Although behaviorists typically believe that behavior is automatic, they tend to view the head as being empty. The mind either doesn’t do anything but produce behaviors or it is a black box of unknown processes. In contrast, Dollard & Miller make unconscious behavior a central theme of their model. According to their view, behaviors are unconscious because when we’re unaware of the cues that trigger the drive, or unaware of the drive itself. Unconscious simply means unlabeled. When a cognitive label is present, the behavior, drive or emotion is no longer unconscious.
Labeling plays an important part in making us less neurotic. According to Dollard & Miller, neurosis is better understood as the stupidity-misery syndrome. When we are neurotic, we are experiencing a strong, unconscious (unlabeled) emotional conflict. The result of our experience is that we can’t discriminate effectively and make bad decisions. That is, when we are unaware of our conflict (stupid), we make bad decisions that make us miserable. Our misery is a result of not labeling our conflicts. The solution is to discover the proper label. Like the fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin (who put a curse on a family which could only be lifted if they guessed his name), we have to guess what we’re feeling and label it. Once labeled, the curse is broken: we are no longer stupid (unaware) and won’t make ourselves miserable.
E
Ebbinghaus, Hermann (1850-1909).
A contemporary of Wundt, Hermann Ebbinghaus experimentally studied and described learning, forgetting, overlearning, and savings. Although he was the first person to publish an article on measuring the intelligence of school children (Binet and Simon used his sentence completion task in their intelligence test), Ebbinghuas is best known for his thorough study of memory and forgetting. His work is widely used and cited by cognitive psychologists today.
Although memory had been discussed by philosophers and studied after the fact, no one before Ebbinghaus had studied the process of memory as it occurred. Philosophers started with existing associations and inferred backwards; Ebbinghuas studied the entire memory process by learning, forgetting and relearning material.
He also was the first person to study memory experimentally. An extremely thorough investigator, Ebbinghaus varied the size of the lists being memorized, standardized their presentation (one per tick of a clock), recorded the number of exposures needed to relearn. Keeping the words in order, like a pack of cards, he quickly looked that the word, and went on to the next one. When he reached the end of the list, he paused for 15 seconds, and went through the list again. He stopped only when he had achieved “complete memory” (prefect recall of the list one time). In addition to the forgetting curve (recall across time), Ebbinghaus plotted the retention curve (savings across time). Savings was the number of trials needed to relearn a list.
Some findings seem obvious. Ebbinghaus found that the more repetitions, the more learned. This practice effect had long been known but never experimentally verified. It also seems obvious that forgetting increases over time but Ebbinghuas showed that forgetting follows a predictable pattern. If time alone was the sole cause, forgetting would show a steady linear increase. But Ebbinghaus showed that forgetting occurs rapidly and then tapers off.
Ebbinghuas also found that over-learning (continued study after mastery) reduces the rate of forgetting and that meaningfulness helps recall. According to Ebbinghaus, not only are meaningful words easier to recall, it takes 10 times more exposure to material in order to learn random words.
Born six years before Freud, Ebbinghaus was raised near Bonn, Germany. He attended the University of Bonn and studied language, history and philosophy. Ebbinghaus was a rationalist and wrote his dissertation on Hartmann’s philosophy of the unconscious. His interest in memory came from reading Fechner’s book on psychophysics.
Although Wundt maintained that it was impossible to study higher mental processes with experiments, Ebbinghaus established procedures and principles still used today. Although not an empiricist, he (along with Konig, Hering and Stumpf) started the second journal devoted to psychology (Journal of Psychology and Physiology of the Sense Organs). Although not a child psychologist, in 1897 Ebbinghaus created a word completion test in order to measure the intelligence of children.
Epicurus (341-270 BC).
Like Aristotle, Epicurus began a school without walls, where lessons were delivered in a more casual setting.
In the case of Epicurus, the garden of his home was used as a school, so he and his followers were called “garden philosophers.” Unlike Aristotle, Epicurus accepted slaves, women and commoners as students. At a time when the Stoics emphasized duty and public service, Epicurus emphasized tranquillity and solitude.
He also encouraged his students to avoid public life and to give themselves to simple pleasures. Although pleasure was the goal of life, it was not the lascivious sensationalism advocated by Aristippus. Epicurean pleasure was the search for serenity and the enjoyment of prudent and just living. Through sober reasoning, one must search though ideas and doctrines, accepting those which produce pleasure and rejecting those that do not produce peace of mind.
Essentially, Epicurus taught the art of happy living. People should enjoy this life because there is no more to come. It is no the length of life that matters; it is the quality of life. The goal is maximize pleasure and avoid pain and anxiety. Epicurus himself never married, had no children, and lived a chaste and quiet existence. During his life, he advocated living for the moment, free will and the humane treatment of slaves. Although Epicureanism is now synonymous with selfishness and culinary delight, his students were fed barley bread and water, and taught that pleasure comes from practicing virtue.
Although originally conceived as a practical system of conduct, it is easy for Epicurean ideals to be altered or misinterpreted. The question is how to differentiate Epicurean tranquillity from selfishness. When taken to extreme such teachings obviously leave little room for postponing satisfaction, sacrifice for a common good or moral behavior. There is no incentive for personal responsibility, public service or martyrdom. Many would agree that virtue produces pleasure but Epicurean ideals disintegrate if actions are not evaluated as right-wrong but solely tested for pleasantness. Friendships become merely opportunities for personal advancement and love is reduced to egotism and self-indulgence.
Yet Epicurus didn’t advocate the extremes. In a culture where duty and power were put ahead of compassion and peace, the emphasis of Epicurus was refreshing. It was the equivalent of telling overachievers to slow down and smell the roses. In contrast to the determinism of the Stoics, Epicurus taught free will and that the gods need not be feared (fear is incompatible with tranquillity). His school was very popular and, unlike the Pythagorean schools, did not advocate communal living. Students kept the wealth they acquired, learned maxims by rote, and enjoyed friendship and simple living.
Erikson, Erik (1902-1994).
Although Erik Erikson (1902-1994) was born in Frankfurt, Germany, his parents were Danish. His father was Protestant and his mother Jewish. When Erik was in his 30s, he moved to the United States, becoming a citizen in 1936.
Erikson emphasized the impact of society on the ego, the continuity of the present and the past, and the importance of personal identity (an inner sense of uniqueness) and identity confusion. Erikson saw ego as a creative problem solver. The ego helps organize one’s personality, and synthesizes the conscious and unconscious experiences. It works toward effective performance, as well as avoiding anxiety.
The ego also develops strengths at each stage of development. According to Erikson, there are eight stages in all. The first 5 stages are comparable to Freud’s, including infancy (oral), muscular (anal), locomotor (genital), latency, and adolescence. In Erikson’s sixth stage, the young adult struggles with intimacy and the development of love. As an adult, the seventh stage which extends from the mid-twenties to age 65, people focus on caring for their children and being productive in their careers. Maturity, the eighth stage, included the development of wisdom and a struggle to turn the fear of death into integrated self.
These stages show how children try to understand and relate to the world. According to Erikson, development stages are epigenetic (upon emergence), sequential (occur only in one order) and hierarchical (personality becomes more complex). The behaviors from one stage don’t disappear when the next one starts but each stage has its own characteristic crisis and virtue. A crisis is a battle between opposites (trust vs. distrust). A virtue is what you acquire when you have mastered that stage (hope).
Here are the crises and virtues for Erikson’s stages:
1. Trust vs distrust: Hope
2. Autonomy vs shame-doubt: Will
3. Initiative vs guilt: Purpose
4. Industry vs inferiority: Competence
5. Ego identity vs role confusion: Fidelity
6. Intimacy vs isolation: Love
7. Generativity vs stagnation: Care
8. Ego integrity vs despair: Wisdom
In his later years, Erikson studied the Sioux Indians (S Dakota) and the Yurok salmon fishermen of northern California. He found the Sioux to be trusting and generous, while the Yurok were miserly and suspicious. According to Erikson, the difference in behavior was the result of their cultures.
F
Fechner, Gustav (1801-1887).
A student of Weber, Gustav Theodore Fechner wrote Weber’s idea in the form of a formula, and called it Weber’s Law. He revised Weber’s law (showing it was logarithmic), and continued Weber’s work on jnd (just noticeable difference), applying it to weight, temperature, etc.
Fechner’s accomplishments are not limited to expanding on Weber’s insights. He studied afterimages and color vision. His description of the “pleasure principle ” influenced Freud years later.
And he solved one of life “insoluble” questions. Although philosophers had struggled to determine how the mind and body interrelate, Fechner proposed an elegant solution to the problem. On October 22, 1850, Fechner had a sudden burst of insight. He saw a quantitative relationship between stimulus (the mind) and sensation (the body). Sensation is dependent on stimulation but they increase at different rates. An increase in sensation requires a geometrical increase in stimulation.
Flourens, Jean Pierre (1794-1867).
French physiologist Pierre Flourens was a pioneer in the use of anesthesia. He showed that chloroform could be very effectively used on animals and people. He also is known for his studies of bone formation.
Flourens was a strong advocate of using experimental methodology. Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte ordered the Academy of Sciences of Paris to study the claims of phrenologist Franz Gall. Phrenology had become so accepted in the general population that the scientific community was concerned. To settle the dispute, the Academy choose Flourens to investigate the matter.
Flourens showed that Gall was partially correct; the brain does have different areas of function. Perfecting the technique on pigeons, Flourens removed portions of the brain and observed the effects. His extirpation procedure (destroying small parts of the brain) revealed that each part of the nervous system had its own function and acted as a unit. Removal of the cerebral hemispheres resulted in loss of perception and judgment. Removal of the cerebellum caused loss of equilibrium and an inability to coordinate motor movements. Removal of the brainstem resulted in death.
Freud, Anna (1895-1982).
She was the youngest of Sigmund’s six children, and the only one to show an interest in his work. She began reading his books when she was 15 but didn’t decide to become an analyst until later. In her early twenties, Anna wanted to be analyzed but who could you go to when there’s no one better than your Dad? So, when she was 23, Sigmund (then in his early sixties) psychoanalyzed Anna.
After Sigmund’s death, Anna was the defender of the faith. She continued to promote his ideas but tended to emphasize ego more than her father had. Anna believed that repression was the main defense mechanism because acting on impulse can hurt you. But more than defending and modifying her father’s work, Anna Freud extended psychoanalytic ideas to children. She maintained that play time was normal, and showed children’s ability to adapt to reality. Children aren’t simply bundled of unconscious conflicts. They are adaptive and creative beings.
In a study she coauthored with Dorothy Burlingham, Anna showed that children look to their parents for cues on how to reaction to situations. During WWII bombing raids, British families were observed in air raid shelters. The children didn’t have instinctive reactions but looked to their mothers to see how she was reacting.
Anna Freud created a classification system to organize evaluations of children’s symptoms. Development was seen as a series of id-ego interactions, where children gain increased control of themselves. Her “diagnostic profile” was a formal assessment procedure that tracked developmental progress on six dimensions of change:
- 1. dependency to emotional self-reliance
- 2. sucking to rational eating
- 3. wetting and soiling to bladder and bowel control
- 4. irresponsibility to responsibility
- 5. play to work
- 6. egocentricity to companionship
Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939).
Although there is great diversity in approaches to mental health, all forms of counseling ultimately owe their own foundation to the work of Sigmund Freud.
Unlike most other theorists, he was not associated with a university, nor was his system based on experimental evidence. Although Freud performed some experimental research early in his career, it had no real relevance to his later theory. Indeed, Freud’s theory had more to do with behavioral deviation than with general principles of behavior. Based in medicine and neurology, he revolted against the traditional German psychiatrists (e.g., Kraepelin) and their insistence on physiological causes for behavioral disorders. As his theory developed, Freud’s explanations became more psychological and less medical.
Born May 6, 1856 in Freiburg, Austria (now Pribor, Czechoslovakia), Sigmund Freud was the eldest child of his father’s second family. His father had two grown sons from a previous marriage, and Sigmund was the first of 8 more. Although his father was a poor wool merchant, every effort was made to give Sigmund every advantage possible. While the rest of the family used candles for light, he was given an oil lamp (better for reading).
He graduated from the Sperl Gymnasium in 1873, considered studying law or physiology but eventually settled on medicine. In 1873, Sigmund entered the University of Vienna and studied with noted physiologist Ernest Brucke (a disciple of Hermann von Helmholtz).. Under Bruche’s direction, Freud published articles on anatomy, physiology and neurology. He wanted an academic appointment as a biologist-physiologist but Jews were “discouraged” from academic and governmental positions but allowed in law and medicine. In 1881, Freud graduated from the University of Vienna.
Shortly before obtaining his medical degree, Freud was befriended by Joseph Breuer, a respected, successful, and sophisticated physician in Vienna. In 1889, Breuer had treated Bertha Pappenheim (referred to as Anna O in his writings). Breuer could find no physiological cause for her symptoms, which included arm and leg paralysis, blurred vision, and confusion, but he found that his patient seemed to improve just from talking about her problems while under hypnosis. Although the symptom set changed, the treatments (which the girl called “chimney sweeping” or “the talking cure”) appeared to be effective in helping her deal with emotionally-charged events from her past. In 1891, 2 years after the fact, Freud and Breuer discussed the case at great length. Together, they pondered the significance of this breakthrough technique, and included her case in a book which they co-wrote. Published in 1895, Studies in Hysteria marked both the end of their friendship and the founding of psychoanalysis.
During his association with Breuer and not too long after graduating from medical school, Freud went to Paris to study with Charcot. In 1885, Charcot was the leading neurologist in France, and the source, according to Freud, of a famous statement. The story goes that in reference to the case of a one patient, Charcot said the cause “in this kind of case, it is always something genital — always, always, always.” Although Charcot denied making the statement, it has become part of Freudian folklore.
Upon his return to Vienna, Freud continued to use hypnosis and Breuer’s “talking cure.” But he discovered that with patients who couldn’t be hypnotized that similar results could be found by talking about their early emotional traumas even if not hypnotized.
Freud’s theory is a deterministic system of internal motivation. Borrowing heavily from the terminology of physics and other sciences, Freud proposes a self-contained system of psychical energy. Behavior is a result of conscious and unconscious processes which oppose and counteract each other. Although responsible for popularizing it, Freud didn’t create the concept of the unconscious mind. Certainly, Leibnitz’s (1646-1716) theory of monads contained the notion of an unconscious but it was Herbart (1776-1841) who fully developed it. Similarly, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) wrote of the negative influence unconscious ideas could have. He also introduced the basic concept of repression.
Freud proposed that the mind is composed of three structures: the id, ego and superego. The id is Freud’s term for the earliest and most basic component of personality. At birth, a neonate is only an id. Like a spoiled child wanting immediate gratification, the id relies on the pleasure principle. The id operates like a reflex, providing the individual’s psychic energy. The id’s primary process generates an image of the object it desires. Since the id is completely unconscious, it can’t distinguish between images and reality.
As an infant matures, it evolves from an id-centric organism in order to deal with reality. With the addition of an ego, the child can interact with reality and tries to acquire in reality the imaginary images produced in the id (object substitution). The ego operates on the reality principle, and controls both the motor and sensory functions of the body. As a child learns right from wrong, the ego creates the third mental component. Like the id, the superego cannot distinguish imagined from real, and consequently punishes you equally for a bad idea as for a bad action. Composed of the conscience (what you should not do) and the ego ideal (what you should do), the superego is in direct opposition to the id (what you want to do). The conflict produced by the fighting of the id and superego is called anxiety. Human behavior is a function of the ego mediating between the forces of the id and superego.
Freud has given us a complicated system of force and counter-force. Although the structure of the mind is illustrative and abstract, his model emphasizes the importance of the individual. Freud based his ideas on case histories and not on experimental data. He shows us that good writing and revolutionary theorizing does not depend on the latest computerized laboratory equipment. Freud emphasized the importance of early childhood, the usefulness of dreams, and that we are not always aware of our own motives.
Frisch & Hitzig.
Gustav Fritsch (1838-1927) & Edward Hitzig (1838-1907). Working in their own laboratory, two German physicians, Gustav Fritsch (1838-1927) and Edward Hitzig (1838-1907), discovered the motor cortex of the brain. Specifically, they found that electrical stimulation of particular areas resulted in muscle movement. If they stimulated a particular spot on the left side of a dog’s brain, its right leg would move.
Fromm, Erich (1900-1980).
He was born in Frankfurt, Germany on March 23, 1900. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg in 1922. Fromm’s loosely constructed theory of personality emphasized social influences and trends.
Fromm maintained that people are lonely, and seeking social contact. Basically a social animal, the greater independence one achieves, the greater loneliness is experienced. To counteract loneliness, people use myths, religions, and totalitarianism to bind themselves to each other. For Fromm, there are only two solutions to the problem: join with others in a spirit of love, or conform to society.
Fromm proposed five basic needs: relatedness (creating relationships), transcendence, rootedness (putting down roots), identity(uniqueness), and orientation (a consistent frame of reference).
According to Fromm, personality is composed of temperment (inherited. unchangeable characteristics) and character (which is learned). Individual character is developed within one’s environment and social character is a result of reaction to society.
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