A Practical Guide to Child Psychology

Understand Your Kids and Enjoy Parenting

Kairen Cullen

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2011
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781848313293
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Embrace the ups and downs of parenting. Guided by experts in children's development, explore new approaches to parenting, understand how they can benefit your family and learn how to put them into practice straight away.Accepting that every child is unique, and that parenting is a continuous learning process, educational psychologist and parenting expert Dr Kairen Cullen explains how best to understand your child and respond to their needs.

PSYCHOANALYTICAL THEORY

10. Freud

Analytic experience has convinced us of the complete truth of the common assertion that the child is psychologically father of the man and that the events of its first years are of paramount importance for its whole subsequent life.

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) emphasized the importance of the very early life of the child and the relationship between the child and parents. He viewed the quality and health of this relationship as a crucial part of the foundations for ongoing development and future adult behaviour, cognition and overall well-being. Although not always directly attributed to him by later researchers and theorists, vast areas of child psychology have developed from his work and from this core idea that early experience is of fundamental importance. At the start of this book, four main theoretical approaches were described: behaviourism, cognitivism, humanism and psychoanalytic (also known as psychodynamic) theory. Freud is generally credited with being the founding father of psychodynamic theory, which in therapeutic practice is usually described as psychoanalysis.

Sigmund Freud

The links between psychodynamic theory and behaviourism are evident in this quote from Freud:

The reason why the infant in arms wants to perceive the presence of its mother is only because it already knows by experience that she satisfies all of its needs without delay.

This stark view of the relationship between baby and mother reveals Freud’s very traditional medical and biological background and the dominant behaviourist model of human behaviour of the time when he started to develop his ideas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Children were viewed as complex organisms with basic drives for food and shelter, and Freud developed his psychodynamic theory on the basis that as the child matured and formed relationships with significant others, its ‘drives’, or instincts, became more complex and were predominantly of a sexual nature. He extended these ideas further to propose a theory of society and the social world in general.

Our civilization is entirely based upon the suppression of instincts.

Freud

Unsurprisingly, many of Freud’s ideas met with resistance, and nowhere more so than in his native Vienna. Interestingly, psychodynamic theory was initially accepted more readily in the USA and in Britain. The very word ‘resistance’ links directly with Freudian theory, and its use in explaining people’s rejection of Freud’s own thinking illustrates the compelling and pervasive nature of his ideas. Freud, when challenged by any criticism of his theory, is said to have responded that this was merely a defensive reaction against the truth of his ideas. Although Freudian theory has been heavily criticized by the academic community, his ideas continue to bloom in the therapeutic practice of many psychotherapists, and it’s commonplace to hear terms originating from Freud’s work in everyday language. In the table below are a number of terms that you may well use yourself.

Key words and phrases arising from Freudian theory

Projection	Part of an individual’s armoury of psychological defences, in which they unconsciously deny their own thoughts and emotions and attribute these to another person.
Separation anxiety	The intense fear experienced by the young child when separated from the key person to whom they are emotionally connected.
Free association	The spontaneous and unforced utterances of patients receiving psychoanalysis that reveal their innermost wishes and motivations.
Object	The person or thing needed for emotional relief and satisfaction.
Oedipus complex	An idea from Greek mythology in which the boy or girl romantically views their opposite-gender parent as a love object and has murderous thoughts about their same-gender parent.
Fixation	An aspect of the unconscious mental processes of an individual, in which all psychic energies and actions are intensely focused on a thing or person.
Psychosomatic	The manifestation of mental distress in physical symptoms.
Repression	The rejection of desires, motivations and/or fantasies, and the unconscious refusal to act on them, because the person feels that to gain satisfaction in this way would be psychologically harmful and/or risk disapproval from others.
Freudian slip	The exposure of someone’s unconscious thoughts or desires through utterance or humour.

Freud believed that as the infant matured s/he increasingly experienced emotional ups and downs and felt the need for love and other strong desires. He also placed great importance on the physical aspects of the child’s development and the child’s innate drive to experience pleasure through different parts of the body at different ages. Freud linked these with phases of psychosexual development – oral, anal, phallic and genital – and the corresponding types of gratification behaviours included sucking, defecating and masturbation. The table below outlines the stages, the psychosexual development phases, and the typical behaviours that normal children and adults experience, according to Freud.

Birth, during weaning, pre-school	Oral	Preoccupation with food and drink, sucking and chewing.
Toilet training and early childhood	Anal	Preoccupation with toilet and bowel and bladder functions.
Middle years of schooling	Latent period	A period of no particular bodily or sexual focus.
Puberty	Phallic	A focus on gratification of emerging and increasingly conscious sexual desires, usually via masturbation.
Post-adolescence, adulthood	Genital	Participation in mutual and adult sexual relationship.

This staged theory of psychosexual development was extended further, and individuals who experienced less than ideal conditions at certain points were viewed as being ‘stuck’ at the corresponding stage. The stage at which the individual was ‘stuck’ was then employed to characterize and describe disordered personality development. For example, an ‘oral-passive’ person, who has been weaned too late, tends to be dependent on others and enjoy oral gratification like eating or smoking. An ‘oral-aggressive person’, however, will have been weaned too early and will display aggressive behaviour and tend to chew on pencils or finger nails, etc. ‘Anal-aggressive’ people, whose potty training was slow, according to Freudian theory are over-the-top socially, excessively friendly or aggressive. ‘Anal-retentive’ types, who had very strict toilet training, are mean and perfectionist in their behaviour and outlook. A major problem with Freud’s theories is that they have been popularized to such an extent that the complexity and sophistication of his ideas has been replaced by very crude and loose ways of describing human behaviour, to a ridiculous and unhelpful degree. Describing a whole and complex person as ‘anal’ or ‘phallic’ on the basis of casual observation – and, most likely, a less than ideal interaction – is obviously not the same as hours and hours of professional in-depth psychoanalysis!

Actually, the dilution of Freud’s ideas is only one of the many criticisms of his work. A range of other major objections have been levelled against them, and these explain the continuing strong ambivalence of the academic community to Freudian theory.

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Major criticisms of Freudian theory

• Most of Freud’s theory developed from his clinical practice, i.e. single cases, and could not be replicated and tested further.

• Freud’s professional history is littered with many conflicts and fractured working alliances.

• Many claim that his professional practice was conducted in a way that was not ethical. For example, he treated his own daughter and subsequently wrote about this in support of his theories.

• Freud placed enormous significance and importance on human sexual behaviour. Many subsequent theorists and practitioners consider this to be an unhealthy and distorted exaggeration, which represents an artificial division between relationship and physical sex.

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Freud’s Oedipus complex theory of children’s psychosexual development suggests that every very young child entertains romantic thoughts and desires about their opposite-gender parent, and also destructive and murderous thoughts and wishes about their same-gender parent. For example, a very small boy, according to Freud, will love his mother in such a way that he wishes to replace the father in his mother’s affections and even destroy the father in order to achieve this. As the boy matures, he resolves this largely unconscious wish through identifying more and more with his father and renouncing his mother, to the point where he can find his own sexual partner. Freud believed that most very young children are bisexual and that their development as sexual adults expressed their own unique mixture of female and male cha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• About the author
• Author’s note
• Contents
• Introduction
• Cognitive Theory
• Psychoanalytical Theory
• Behaviourism
• Humanism
• Other Important Theories
• Applications of Child Psychology
• Final Points
• References