Psychoanalytic Theory | MCAT Psychology Prep

(00:06) What is the Psychoanalytic Theory of Personality?
Now the first thing I want to mention is that a theory is just a theory, it's not fact. A theory is a set of explanations that one makes to explain the observations that they've made. The explanations that make up a theory are not necessarily true. In any case, like everything in the realm of psychoanalytic theory, we have to start with Sigmund Freud.
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(00:32) Who created Psychoanalytic Theory?
Freud was a physician who treated mental disorders using a technique he developed called psychoanalysis. The goal of psychoanalysis was to study the unconscious mind. To Freud, understanding the unconscious mind was very important in determining an individual's motivations and behaviors.
(00:51) How does Psychoanalysis Work?
The way psychoanalysis works is the physician has very lengthy verbal interactions with the patient. The goal of these interactions is to determine the influence of repressed conflicts, sexual urges, early childhood memories, and internal conflicts on the motivations and behaviors of the individual. So when Freud had these long verbal interactions with patients, he made many observations. From these observations, he developed a psychoanalytic theory with hypotheses to explain these observations.
(01:24) The Unconscious Mind
Now, as mentioned earlier, Freud really focused on the unconscious mind and how important it was for determining our behaviors. For example, Freud believed that slips of the tongue, or Freudian slips, often reveal a person's unconscious desires.
(01:37) Example of a Freudian Slip
As an example, let's say you have an employee at a company and they're training a new hire. During the training, they mean to say, “Don't touch the hot wire,” but instead they accidentally say, “Don’t touch the hot hire.” Now, “hot hire” certainly has a sexual aspect to it. Freud would have one hundred percent taken this slip of the tongue as a revelation of the employee’s sexual desires for that new hire.
(02:20) Summary: Psychoanalytic Theory
All right, so this is an introduction to psychoanalytic theory according to Freud. Again, this is just a theory and we know now that there is very little experimental support for most of what Freud came up. So the next thing we’ll go over is some criticisms of this theory.
First, Freud believed that our behavior is primarily determined by unconscious thoughts that we're not aware of. A lot of psychologists have an issue with this because this suggests that we don't have conscious control over ourselves. Instead, Freud’s theory postulates that these unconscious thoughts that we don't even know about control our lives.
Second, Freud heavily emphasized the role of childhood experiences on our lives. The criticism here is that this suggests that our future is largely determined by the early years of our life. In other words, Freud believed that if a certain event happened in your childhood, you were going to grow up to be a certain kind of person. Many psychologists disagree with this idea that your future is determined solely by what happened when you were a child.
And finally, many psychologist believe that Freud focused too much on sexual desires. There actually psychologists that came after Freud, who built upon his theory and, in some cases, shifted the theory away from sexual desires and more towards social interactions.