PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACHES

Psychological Approaches

Psychological Approaches

Introduction

Aggression is an action. It is intended to harm someone. It can be a verbal attack--insults, threats, sarcasm, or attributing nasty motives to them--or a physical punishment or restriction. Aggression also seems to be a way of maintaining social order among many species. Animals compete with each other over food, mates, and dwelling spaces, often showing aggression and occurring among virtually all vertebrate species, including humans. However, if aggression is an effective way of maintaining social order, reckless violence appears to be a poor survival mechanism. Nevertheless, this trait has not been wiped out. Since it hasn't disappeared, it is logical that researchers have tried to understand the nature of this behavior(Hayes 2000).

Psychodynamic Theory and agression

Sigmund Freud is well known as the father of psychoanalysis. In his early theory, Freud asserts that human behaviors are motivated by sexual and instinctive drives known as the libido, which is energy derived from the Eros, or life instinct (Skinner 1953). Thus, the repression of such libidinal urges is displayed as aggression. As an example of the expression of aggression as explained by Freud, let us consider his work on childhood aggression, and the Oedipus Complex. A boy around age five begins to develop an intense sexual desire for his mother. He has come to regard her as the provider of food and love and thus wants to pursue an intimate, close relationship. The desire for his mother causes the boy to reject and display aggression toward his father. The father is viewed as a competitive rival and the goal they both try to attain is the mother's affection (Hayes 2000). Thus, an internal conflict arises in the young boy. On one hand, he loves his father, but on the other, he wants him to essentially "disappear", so that he can form an intimate relationship with his mother. A boy will develop an immense feeling of guilt over this tumultuous conflict and come to recognize the superiority of his father because of his size. This evokes fear in the boy and he will believe that by pursuing his mother's affection his father will want to hurt him, essentially castrate him (Crisp Turner 2007). To resolve the conflict, the boy learns to reject his mother as a love object and will eventually identify with his father. Thus, he has come to understand that an intimate relationship with his mother is essentially inappropriate.

Freud also developed the female Oedipal Complex, later named the Electra Complex, which is a similar theory for the childhood aggression of girls. In this theory, a girl around the age of five develops penis envy in attempts to relate to her father and rejects her mother (Hayes 2000). A similar internal conflict arises in the young girl, which is resolved after regarding her father as an inappropriate love object and ultimately identifying with her mother.

These examples of Freud's psychoanalytic theory demonstrate the idea that aggression is an innate personality characteristic common to all humans, and that behavior is motivated ...