Psychodynamic Theories: Drive Theory, Ego Psychology, Object Relations Theory...

when i started learning about psychodynamic theory i thought you know there was freud and that was pretty much it little did i know however the more i read the more confused i got and to this day i haven't discovered let alone studied everything that falls under this big umbrella term but with this video i hope to give you a little and totally incomplete overview of some of the most important schools of thought within psychodynamic psychology we'll cover the four psychologies of psychoanalysis namely drive theory ego psychology object relations theory and self-psychology and you know some young and some adla and then your freudians and of course you know there's also la con there's sullivan and god knows who but we'll try to keep it simple i hope this overview will lead to some more clarity and not more confusion so here we go psychodynamic theory was born with freud's classical psychoanalysis he called his psychology metapsychology and this metapsychology was based on freud's drive theory but actually he developed three drive theories in his lifetime i made some more detailed videos about those and i'll link them below but the gist is that the first effect trauma model centered around traumatic childhood events which actually comes really close to current neurophysiological perspectives around early childhood trauma the following topographical model differentiated the conscious preconscious and unconscious contents of the psyche and lastly the structural model introduced the aid ego superego structure a metapsychology according to freud would entail to describe the dynamic economic and topographical or structural elements of a psychic process that means understanding the conflict between different psychic forces the energy that is at work and is being transferred and the psychic level and systems it is happening in the big achievement of freud's work was to establish the idea of the unconscious inner conflict he also put a lot of emphasis on psychosexual development and the libido and death drive which subsequently many other schools and thinkers disregarded or transformed the first two big influential freudian contemporaries that split from him over you know disagreement regarding the role of libido and psychosexual development by alfred adler and carl gustav young young in particular disagreed with freud's pessimistic view of the unconscious which jung saw as you know much more than just a place of repressed negative emotions and memories in addition jung really expanded greatly on the idea of the unconscious and differentiated between the personal unconscious which you know would more or less align with what freud had in mind and the collective unconscious the collective unconscious contains the archetypes which can also act as a benevolent helping figures with the archetypes there were many more potential inner conflicts that then you know just between the id eco super ego there were potential conflicts between the anima the animos the self the shadow the persona and many more in general jung took a much more mystical approach than freud and you find a playlist full of videos i made about him below the way in which a new psychology comes to fruition is also through the population that is being studied freud himself and his patients were primarily from wealthy families atla on the other hand began his career working as a general practitioner in the less wealthy part of vienna allah early on kind of reintroduced the importance of the social dimension and interpersonal relationships in his theory which after breaking with freud he called individual psychology and he aimed at formulating a much more practical psychology that also layman could make use of and i don't know if you ever read freud or jung and then adler you really appreciate his simplicity and applicability right away i made a lot of videos about adla i'll link a playlist below the most important aspect of elarian psychology is that behavior is determined by goals that aim to go from inferiority to superiority following atla there has been a new movement of so-called neo-freudians that included karen hornai sullivan otto rank and erich from among others all of them focused more or less on interpersonal relationships and the present rather than biological drives and the past especially autorank but also atla had a big impact on carl rogers who developed humanistic psychology so this part of the psychodynamic theory blends over into kind of humanistic thinking and sometimes differentiating between you know neo-freudian psychodynamic and humanistic thinkers gets kind of tricky moving back to what i'll just broadly call the freudian lineage the eco psychology grew out of roy's structural model and from the name you can already tell that the focus is on the ego and specifically the ability to adjust and to manage reality i want to pick out two important contributions that stem from ego psychology the first were defense mechanisms that were contributed by anna freud who is actually easy one for his daughter and she greatly elaborated on the work of her father a defense mechanism keeps things out of consciousness it is a mechanism that the ego uses to defend itself against any feeling or thought that would cause great anxiety today the reason there isn't really any like agreed upon summary or categorization of of defense mechanisms but you'll easily find different examples that will give you a better idea the second important contribution were the ego functions introduced by hans hartmann hartman's idea was that a person's development isn't just the result of the drives you know of the id and the demands of the superego and the conflict between those two but that there must be some ego abilities that develop into functions which aid its development and the adaptation to the world this was a much more positive view than freud had because it meant for hartmann that every child is born with abilities to adjust to what he called an average expectable environment those abilities are for example perception thinking speaking or memory and they develop into eco functions such as reality testing meaning you know that you can differentiate between what is real from what is not emotion regulation tolerating disappointment delay gratification ability to get into contact with others and from relationships as well as intellect logic and using mature defenses because you know don't make the mistake that using defense mechanisms is a bad thing if everyone would stop using defense mechanisms the world would be a hell house we need you know inner function to regulate what comes to consciousness and needs to be dealt with and you know what can be brushed aside or just kept for another day explaining and treating psychopathologies through only you know broadly focusing on conflicts between the it the ego and the super ego reach its limit with more severe psychopathologies that you know we would today probably call personality disorders there was finally an increasing interest in interaction between intra-psychic and interpersonal processes especially paying more attention to what happens between the patient and the therapist and not just you know what happens within the patient that meant that from a so-called one-person psychology the object relations theory turned that into a two-person psychology meaning there was more emphasis being put on you know the central function of early attachment and relationship experiences especially as they relate to the inter-psychic representations of the self and to the other as well as their relationship the idea is that we internalize ideas of who we are and how other people are and what our relationships to others are if we talk about people entering into the same dysfunctional relationships again and again object relations theory would assume that this is the enactment of this internalized representation of what it means to be in a relationship or you might have heard of otto kanbeck's theory for borderline personality disorder where to simplify the idea is that there are very archaic representations of the self and the other that are either all good or all bad and because there is no integration of good and bad aspects of the self and others you get those you know intense shifts in mood idealization and hate black and white thinking that is so characteristic for borderline because only one of those representations can be active at the same time there are so many you know different object relations theories that again even within the umbrella term psychodynamic theory object relations theory really it's just another umbrella term and broadly speaking there are two camps there is the fatherly or heart object relation theory and the motherly or soft object relation theory in general the heart object relations theory put more emphasis on the drive as suggested by freud and they consider aggression to be important which includes especially melanie klein and otto kanback and relevant today are especially otto kanback's contribution to the understanding and treatment of personality disorders with you know his works on the borderline personality organization which is not the same as border borderline personality disorder and transference focused psychotherapy in general though the therapy within the heart object relations theories focuses on uncovering confronting and interpreting on the other hand there are soft object relations theories for example balant winnicott and you could also name cohort self psychology as a special kind of object relations theory but we'll cover that as a separate school the soft or motherly camp focuses much more on therapy that is very supporting puts a lot of focus on empathy and the lack of love in the primary relationship to the caregiver you know they focus way less on aggression or destructive behavior because for them this is simply the result of the lack of love and empathy the patient experienced another very important theory that grew mostly out of object relations theory and combined it you know with evolutionary psychology or a lot of developmental observation and cognitive psychology is attachment theory by john balby today this is such an important theory in psychodynamic therapy for example you know mentalization based treatment another very important therapy for borderline personality disorder is based on that and you know the different attachment styles such as secure avoidant anxious have gathered a lot of attention but in the beginning bulby was not has not been treated well by the psychological community he moved from analyzing adults and then you know deducting theories about childhood to actually observing children which makes so much sense but we argued that safety and not sexuality is the central topic of you know the parent-child relationship the mother is the safe haven and that doesn't mean that the goal of the child is you know the mother but the feeling the inner state the bodily state that the child experiences when it achieves the right amount of closeness with the mother moving on to the last school i want to introduce today and that's self psychology self psychology was developed in the late 60s early 70s by heinz kohut who elaborated on the concept of narcissism and the self he intended his work as a continuation of ego psychology with a crucial difference in his approach to human nature while ego psychology and with it you know freud's drive theory conceptualized man as the guilty man kohut centers his theory around the tragic man the tragic man tries to actualize himself to live a fulfilled and creative life this is quite fitting you know for our modern time where it's much more about topics of self-worth identity and belonging rather than about sexuality and norms that were much more pressing in freud's time if his inability to do so is bigger than his successes his unlived and unexpressed potential is what makes him tragic gold departures from you know the difficulties he encountered when treating narcissistic patients where he found that an empathic break between therapist and patient resulted in enormous fears of complete disintegration on the patient's end and code focused much more on deficits of the self than conflicts because he found that conflicts in this case can be a consequence of those deficits and those deficits of the self are a result of a lack of empathy from the caregiver in early childhood this lack of empathy causes a lack of coherence in the self which means that it's not strong enough to weather the storms of life and then the self kind of needs crutches in the form of grandiosity and also aggression to somehow you know find a way to stabilize yourself and create a sense of self-worth before ending this video i want to leave with a short critical remark regarding self-psychology from this focus on empathy there was a sense that the therapist needs to take over the role of the parent and be completely empathically in tune with the patient i think today especially on social media some people use the concept of re-parenting in this sense it is however dangerous if you blame any form of aggression from the patient on falling short of empathy on the therapist side and this is also sometimes where the current social media culture takes a turn for the worse if the sentiment is taken to the extreme and basically all responsibility is taken away from the person and blame is put on the others because in the end growth doesn't happen without the right amount of frustration thank you for your attention i'll see you next time bye [Music] you

Channel: Psychodynamic Psychology

Views: 32,359

Keywords: psychodynamic theory, sigmund freud, object relations theory, psychoanalytic theory, drive theory, ego psychology, self psychology, alfred adler, neo-freudians, carl jung, attachment theory, psychology, freud

Id: gbmySNY-8Sw

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 09 2022