PS210 Unit 4 Psychoanalysis and Its Critics Paper Example

Freud, Adler and Horney on Where Anxiety Comes From: A PS210 Unit 4 Paper on Psychoanalysis and Its Critics

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Purdue University Global

PS210: History of Psychology

Unit 4 Psychoanalysis and Its Critics Paper

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[Date]

The thread connecting the theorists to modern therapy is the writer's own; the sources cited are real.

Freud's Account

Sigmund Freud, a Viennese neurologist, built psychoanalysis on the premise that people are largely unaware of their own motives and that symptoms express conflicts between instinctual drives, especially sexual and aggressive ones, and the demands of conscience and reality. Anxiety signals that forbidden impulses threaten to surface, and defenses such as repression keep them out of awareness. Treatment, through free association and dream interpretation, aimed to bring the conflict into consciousness (Schultz & Schultz, 2016).

Adler's Revision

Alfred Adler, an early member of Freud's circle, left in 1911 over disagreements about the role of sexuality. His individual psychology held that people are driven less by sexual instinct than by the effort to overcome feelings of inferiority that begin in childhood, and that health shows itself in social interest, an active concern for the community one belongs to. Adler also emphasized each person's style of life, the characteristic set of beliefs and goals through which they interpret experience.

Horney's Challenge

Karen Horney, trained in psychoanalysis in Berlin, rejected Freud's account of women's development, arguing that what he described as biological envy reflected women's real social disadvantages. In New Ways in Psychoanalysis, she argued that neurosis grows from basic anxiety, the frightened loneliness of a child who feels unprotected among others, and that culture shapes what people fear and how they defend against it (Horney, 1939). In later work she described rigid, self-defeating inner demands, which she called the tyranny of the should (Horney, 1950).

Horney's tyranny of the should reads like an early description of the rigid beliefs cognitive therapists later targeted.

Comparing the Three

All three placed the source of anxiety in early experience and in processes outside full awareness. They differed on what drives those processes: instinct for Freud, the struggle against inferiority for Adler, insecure relationships and culture for Horney. Adler and Horney moved the explanation from biology toward beliefs, goals and social context, which made it easier to imagine changing the person's view of themselves rather than uncovering hidden drives.

What Survived

Freud's specific theories about psychosexual stages and dream symbols fared poorly when tested (Leahey, 2018), and psychoanalytic treatment was long and hard to evaluate. Two ideas survived in changed form. Unconscious processes are now studied in cognitive psychology as automatic thoughts and processing outside awareness. And Adler's style of life and Horney's tyranny of the should anticipated the belief systems that Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, both trained in psychoanalytic approaches, would make central to rational emotive and cognitive therapy. The thread from psychoanalysis to cognitive behavioral therapy runs not through Freud's drives but through his critics' attention to what people believe about themselves.

References

Horney, K. (1939). New ways in psychoanalysis. W. W. Norton.

Horney, K. (1950). Neurosis and human growth: The struggle toward self-realization. W. W. Norton.

Leahey, T. H. (2018). A history of psychology: From antiquity to modernity (8th ed.). Routledge.

Schultz, D. P., & Schultz, S. E. (2016). A history of modern psychology (11th ed.). Cengage Learning.