[Music] what is a psychodynamic perspective the psychodynamic perspective was originally developed by sigmund freud but includes ideas from many others who have developed freud's argument the main assumption of the psychodynamic perspective is that many important influences on behavior come from a part of the mind that individuals have no direct awareness of the unconscious the psychodynamic perspective emphasizes the role of the unconscious mind the structure of personality and the influence that childhood experiences can have in later life freud believed that the unconscious mind determines much of our behavior and that we are motivated by unconscious emotional drives freud believed that the unconscious contains unresolved conflicts and has a powerful effect on our behavior and experience he argued that many of these conflicts will show up in our fantasies and dreams but the conflicts are so threatening that they appear in disguised forms in the shape of symbols freud proposed that the adult personality has three parts the id the ego and the superego the id is a combination of pleasure-seeking desires we are born with it this is also known as inner desires the ego develops later and it controls the desires of the id the superego is a moralistic part of the personality which develops as a child interacts with significant others such as its parents the superego can be seen as a conscience it is the role of the ego to maintain a balance between the it and the superego freud believed that children passed through five stages of development known as the psychosexual stages because of freud's emphasis on sexuality as the basic drive in development these stages are the oral stage the anal stage the phallic stage the latency period and finally the genital stage the phallic stage from three to five years old was the stage where the child's sexual identification was established during this stage freud hypothesized that a young boy would experience what he calls the oedipus complex this would provide the child with highly disturbing conflicts which had to be resolved by the child identifying with the same sex to parent a main strength of the psychodynamic perspective is the way it can be used to explain a wide variety of phenomena in fact some followers of the psychodynamic perspective believe that all human life can be explained from a psychodynamic approach however you will find even more psychologists who argue that the psychodynamic theory cannot explain anything perhaps freud's greatest legacy is the invention of therapies for treating mental disorders freud believed that once unconscious conflicts and emotions were made conscious that they could be discussed and resolved freud himself briefly used hypnosis to gain access to patients and conscious thoughts but then developed a technique of free association however there is considerable controversy relating to the psychoanalytic treatments regarding both their usefulness and abuse by unscrupulous therapists one of the many criticisms of the psychodynamic perspective is that it's highly subjective and its ideas are hard to test scientifically for example most of the ideas are based on case studies of individuals that are not easily tested experimentally furthermore the psychodynamic approach does not make any generalizations based on these case studies of individuals as case studies are often used in a psychodynamic perspective the samples are extremely small and so the results or information obtained cannot be generalized to other samples because it is not representative case studies are also very individual and cannot be replicated on other people because of individual differences and hence are not very reliable the perspective is very subjective and cannot be tested objectively as the psychologists make their own interpretations this makes them very biased as well there are no scientific findings or methods used to back up the data so it is not very reliable at all