CHILD PSYCHOLOGY

Child Psychology



Child Psychology

Sigmund Freud was a Austrian neurologist who attempted to discover the underlying motives that govern our behaviour. He believed our conscious experience to be only minute when compared with the subconscious which he viewed as an enormous storehouse of emotions, passions and corporeal desires which affect our feelings and actions. Freud attempted to investigate the unconscious by the method of psychoanalysis observation.

Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, was born in Freiberg, of Jewish parents. He moved to Vienna where he studied medicine, specializing in neuropathology, particularly in infantile paralysis and speech problems such as aphasia (Mellard, 2009; Hoffman, 2010). On those days the Jews could not work in public institutions such as hospitals, nor teach in the University, so he stood at a private consultation. This led him to treat patients suffering from hysteria, a neurotic reaction in which emotional conflicts are converted into physical symptoms such as paralysis and deafness (currently, the preferred term conversion disorder hysterical).

His move to psychopathology came when he met Jean-Martin Charcot, a physician specializing in nervous disorders, who practiced hypnosis to cure the sick of hysteria in the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris (Frost, 2011; Adriaens & De Block, 2010). The French government awarded him a scholarship to Freud to go a year studying in Paris and there he could see how some women paralyzed with a hysterical syndrome, arose during the sessions of hypnosis Charcot. Check that there is a mental level that continues to operate in the unconscious, even while under the influence of hypnosis (Hoffman, 2010).

At first, Freud attempted to alleviate the symptoms of hysteria with hypnosis and electromagnets, but soon found that the "cures" and achieved were temporary. In the search for a permanent cure invented a psychological tool for the exploration of personality, called free association through which discovered the unconscious realm of psychic life (Mellard, 2009; Hoffman, 2010). It was mainly this exploration of the unconscious psychic life of their patients what inspired him to create psychoanalysis, Freud's primary accomplishment and strut his fame. Psychoanalysis is both a therapeutic method and a theory of personality.

With his friend Joseph Breuer, who also had a consultation in Vienna, is how Freud made his way to Psychoanalysis. Breuer was a patient, Anna O. had fainting, tachycardia, and skin problems, but thanks to hypnosis these symptoms were reduced and even disappeared (Frost, 2011; Adriaens & De Block, 2010). What these problems occurred in the patient were the sexual abuse he suffered as a child by a relative. It was from here that Freud said that behind every problem there is another psychological sexual problem.

For Freud, the mind has three subsystems: the conscious or what we are thinking, the preconscious which is what there is in the conscious, but at any time can be and the unconscious that is hidden and not allow our minds to surface, only comes through dreams, we make mistakes unintentionally, free associations or under hypnosis (Hoffman, 2010; Mellard, ...