We have discussed at length in class the question of why study history? For the final please answer the question at length. The final is online and due on the day and time of the scheduled final for the class. It is worth 40 points. This is double the requirement for the 20 point assignments in the syllabus rubric.
Please send the final work to my email address otto.maclin@uni.edu
Why is it important to learn about the development of different types of therapy (ie client centered v earlier practices)?
Well I think it’s nice to learn how far we have come in certain types of therapy and how therapy has evolved. I’m currently taking Therapeutic Communication, which is a class offered in social work which covers a variety of therapies, so this is a subject I’m interested in and I found this class very beneficial. We started off with Freud and psychoanalysis. Although Freud is a person I cover in almost every class I’m in, there is still always something new that I learn about him each time it’s covered. Psychoanalysis was really how modern therapy really started and came about. Although many people now feel that Freud’s ideas and theories were ridiculous, he made strides in therapy and had a lot of influence in this field which is why he is discussed in almost every class. Many of his techniques are still used in therapy, just modified. For instance many clients even now do use free association and just say things that are on their minds. Many clients are also resistant to tell the therapist what is going on. We now realize that the main reason a client would resist would probably be because they do not yet trust the therapist. When Freud started psychotherapy there wasn’t yet an emphasis on the client-therapist relationship. It was just that the therapist was the expert on the client’s life not the client being the expert on their own life. With Freud his biggest thing was dreams and the unconscious. He wanted the unconscious to become conscious. He also discussed the id, ego, and superego and the defense mechanisms that clients may have.
Alfred Adler created individual psychology just after psychoanalysis became popular, he disagreed with Freud’s idea of sex being a motivator and decided to create his own therapy. Adler had the belief of the inferiority complex. He felt that our failings or obstacles helped to motivate us. Adler however was not the only one of Freud’s original followers to question his theories on sex. Carl Jung also questioned this. He the developed his own branch of psychoanalysis called analytic psychology. He also believed in individuation where the unconscious and conscious come together to create the person’s “true self”. That was basically the goal of his therapy.
It’s important to look at therapy started and the problems that it has had and the changes that have been made. For instance many people do not believe in Freud’s theory of sex motivation, so that was cut from most therapies now. Most people now do not have the client’s lay on a couch like Freud did, now they sit in chair, or at least sit up on a couch instead of laying down. Therapy also moves along with the different theories of psychology as well. For instance, although we did not talk much about it gestalt psychology has its own therapy that is model after the ideas of the theory. Out of all the therapies I had learned in my class this therapy was my least favorite, however when were actually learned about gestalt psychology in this class I didn’t think it was that bad. Fritz Perls was the creator of gestalt therapy and he was a very cold and almost seemed like a mean therapist, whereas now the therapists are much more like a friend. Perls would push people, but not necessarily in a positive way to get them motivated. Modern gestalt therapy puts much more emphasis on the client-therapist relationship which is very healthy. Then there is behavioral therapy which is used a lot now for treating phobias. Joseph Wolpe was able to take the ideas of Mary Cover Jones and her direct conditioning and use those ideas to form a technique for therapy. Although they weren’t covered cognitive therapy had two great therapists as well, Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck. Aaron Beck was really the first person to really discover that depression is correlated with negative thinking. So he felt to treat depression the client will need to change their thinking. It’s a task that the client must do, the therapist can not change the ideas of a client, so hopefully by the end of therapy the client would have more rational thinking.
Carl Rogers created client-centered therapy. He felt the need to make the client the expert on their own life and the client is the one who controls the outcome of therapy. Rogers felt that if practitioners did three basic things that this therapy could be successful. The therapist must be genuine, they must be themselves. This was very different from Freud. Freud felt that the therapist must act a certain way, but now the therapist is free to be themselves but still maintain some professionalism. If the therapist is really showing who they are the client is more likely to open up. The therapist must also have an unconditional positive regard for the client. They should care about the client and not judge the clients choices or behavior. The therapist should also have empathy for the client. They should try and see situations from the client’s point of view. So the therapist should reflect on the client and their choices. Therapy became much more optimistic.
I believe that knowing the different therapies and how they have changed helps us recognize how psychology and the ideas of psychology have changed as well. Right now cognitive-behavioral therapy is very popular and so is that field of psychology as well. Therapy is constantly changing in order to get the best results for the clients. We need to know what therapies don’t seem to work, and the therapies that can actually make a difference. This helps us grow as therapists to become more effective to future clients.
What realm of psychology was of most interest to you and why?
There were several topics that I found interesting. I did really enjoy learning about school psychology and the different people who seemed to contribute to that. Although I am not a teaching major, I am thinking about becoming a school psychologist and so I think that this topic was interesting for me because of that. I would really love to work in the school system, but I don’t think being a teacher would be the right fit for me. The person I really liked learning about who was also interested in education was John Dewey. He had some very modern ideas for the classroom and really seemed to think out of the box and I really enjoyed learning about that. His prime was 100 years ago, but his ideas are still relevant even now and I just think that makes it very interesting. He was the head of a movement called progressive education. He didn’t like the traditional approach to teaching and felt that it restricted the students from really learning the material. He also felt that there were many adversive things in the classroom, and not many parts that really encouraged learning. I know in bmod we talked about eliminating the adversives in the classroom and trying to focus on the positives and make the room friendlier for reinforcements in learning. He felt the education and learning was just drilled into student’s head, educators wanted students to memorize or know the information right away, rather than discovering the information on their own and reaching their own conclusions. This way of teaching really doesn’t encourage questions or curiosity. Because of this Dewey created his own laboratory school and focused on the students and tried to discover how students learn best. He discovered in the studies that student’s learn best be interacting with their environment. So students are best at learning by doing “hands on” activities. So he wanted to encourage curiosity and creativity.
I feel like it’s great that I know all this material, but I won’t really know what to do with it until I’m able to apply it to the people I work with. I will be entering a field experience next semester and I like many other people feel like I have no idea what I am doing and feel like I haven’t learned enough at school, but I know that when I am doing my internship that things I have learned in the classroom will hopefully start to come through and be used. This internship will really be the true test of what I’ve learned in my four years of college. I will finally be getting the hands on experience I need in order to apply my knowledge. I’m so glad that my major requires this field experience before I actually have a job otherwise I really would be at a loss for what to do. I’m surprised more fields do not require an internship or some type of experience before graduation. It would benefit students in so many ways.
Even now we do not really seem to encourage hands on learning. I have always been a hands on learner and I always did well in science classes where that was expected. I overall liked those classes a lot more than my English and math classes because I actually got to “do” what we would talk about. We could ask those tough questions and we could hold fire in our hands using soap. We learned how to do those things in science class, but in any other type of class critical thinking and hands on learning didn’t happen. Even in history classes we didn’t ask why the Romans did this or this, it just happened and that was what we had to know. I didn’t really ask questions or think critically until high school and college. It’s almost like questions really just weren’t encouraged at all. Professors wonder why students don’t critically think, and it’s just because our teachers in middle school and high school didn’t want that. Those teachers want us to do everything by the book and by the answers they gave us, they don’t want us to ask why. This is one of the reason why I really enjoyed this class. I could ask those tough questions and try to challenge myself to find the answer. This help us use our own resources to find the answers to questions that we’re interesting in and want to learn more about. It just really encourages learning and critically thinking. If students had classes like this starting in middle school it would significantly help them in their high school years. They would be challenged and that’s not a bad thing at all.
How would you apply this class to your everyday life?
The great thing about psychology is that it is the study of people so it can easily be applied to everyday life since we’re constantly around other people for the most part. A lot of what we learn in this class may not only be applied to other people, but to ourselves as well. We can conduct our own self experiments and be the participant in our own mini study.
I feel like many students can relate to the studies conducted about memory and things like the forgetting curve especially when it comes to information for certain classes. With some classes we cram in all of our studying and then the information doesn’t stick in our brains. However with other classes we read the chapters throughout the class and pay attention to the material and maybe we even take notes on the material, so the material is repeated again and again, so we actually learn the material. So the information learned in these types of classes actually sticks with us and we use it again. Hermann Ebbinghaus did a lot of work with memory and studied repetition. With classes there’s a lot of information that would be covered for a test, so it’s important to keep review the material so you can actually retain it. Ebbinghaus discovered that it takes more repetition to learn more information. He also discovered that when the information was seven syllables or less that is was very easy to remember. He also did some research on the savings method which talks about memory throughout time. In those classes where I memorize the material for a test, but then don’t use it after it is memorized, I will forget it. If I keep using the information that I used I will remember it. So if I can learn to keep repeating important information I have learned and to keep using it rather than not, I should be more successful in the test of real-life application of my schooling.
This can even be applied to the information I learn in this class. Since these chapters did seem to build on each other the information was repeated over time and will probably stay with me for a while. However if during my internship next semester I don’t think about any of the information I learned in this class or anything and I was asked again to write a final blog, it would not be as detailed and it would cover much less material. There are many classes that I have forgotten about in my college career, however there are many others that I thought would never apply to my life or even to other psych classes I would take, but they did and I was wrong. It will be a lot harder next semester to retain information from school since I will be doing a field experience, but hopefully what I have learned in school will be able to be applied to the job.
There however are many other ways I can apply this class to my everyday life. In this class we talked a lot about asking those big questions and really overall just thinking critically about psychology and the people involved. This is something I can do in my everyday life. I can ask tough questions to my friends and family. I can also try and ask tough questions to my advisors for my internship and also my field liaison. Questions are something we can use no matter what. I will do my best to remember to ask those hard questions and try to absorb as much information as possible, especially while working at my field experience. For an internship it’s important to learn as much as you can, so I will try to do that.
Another way to apply this class is that in this class we see how much the field of psychology has grown and evolved and changed. We see that ideas that once were thought to be correct are now not studied anymore and are not popular. We also see how small ideas that were touched on in the past, have evolved and grown into major theories such as behaviorism. There were ideas that people had that almost predicted the future of psychology, but at the time they were viewed as ridiculous ideas and now they are important. So I guess I will take with me that life is always changing and the theories are always evolving and growing. Some become popular and others are ideas that no one else in the field values so they are shot down. It doesn’t mean that idea won’t become popular later. It doesn’t mean that popular idea or theory was right. I guess in a way I realize that even if I have a same idea about psychology or a theory that I think may work, it may be an idea that in my time doesn’t fit, but 100 years later it may be the next big theory. I’m constantly coming up with new ideas and this just tells me that that’s a really good thing and that idea could become the future of psychology. We cannot predict where the future of psychology is going, or what may come next and learning about the history of psychology just proves it. The future of psychology has so many factors related to it, just like a person with a mental illness has many other factors contributing as well. The future of psychology is related to the events that happen at that time. It’s related to wars or environmental disasters, it’s related to technology. There’s just so many factors that psychology plays off of that we can’t yet determine what the future will be like. So from this class I have learned to keep coming up with questions and ideas because life is unpredictable and you never know what might happen.
Key words: Hermann Ebbinghaus, Historicism, savings method, forgetting curve, school psychology, John Dewey, progressive education, laboratory school, gestalt psychology, freud, psychoanalysis, free association, resistant, defense mechanisms, Fritz Perls, Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, individual psychology, analytic psychology, individuation, Joseph Wolpe, Mary Cover Jones, direct conditioning, systematic desensitization, Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis, Carl Rogers, Client-centered therapy,
Why is it important to learn about the development of different types of therapy (ie client centered v earlier practices)?
Well I think it’s nice to learn how far we have come in certain types of therapy and how therapy has evolved. I’m currently taking Therapeutic Communication, which is a class offered in social work which covers a variety of therapies, so this is a subject I’m interested in and I found this class very beneficial. We started off with Freud and psychoanalysis. Although Freud is a person I cover in almost every class I’m in, there is still always something new that I learn about him each time it’s covered. Psychoanalysis was really how modern therapy really started and came about. Although many people now feel that Freud’s ideas and theories were ridiculous, he made strides in therapy and had a lot of influence in this field which is why he is discussed in almost every class. Many of his techniques are still used in therapy, just modified. For instance many clients even now do use free association and just say things that are on their minds. Many clients are also resistant to tell the therapist what is going on. We now realize that the main reason a client would resist would probably be because they do not yet trust the therapist. When Freud started psychotherapy there wasn’t yet an emphasis on the client-therapist relationship. It was just that the therapist was the expert on the client’s life not the client being the expert on their own life. With Freud his biggest thing was dreams and the unconscious. He wanted the unconscious to become conscious. He also discussed the id, ego, and superego and the defense mechanisms that clients may have.
Alfred Adler created individual psychology just after psychoanalysis became popular, he disagreed with Freud’s idea of sex being a motivator and decided to create his own therapy. Adler had the belief of the inferiority complex. He felt that our failings or obstacles helped to motivate us. Adler however was not the only one of Freud’s original followers to question his theories on sex. Carl Jung also questioned this. He the developed his own branch of psychoanalysis called analytic psychology. He also believed in individuation where the unconscious and conscious come together to create the person’s “true self”. That was basically the goal of his therapy.
It’s important to look at therapy started and the problems that it has had and the changes that have been made. For instance many people do not believe in Freud’s theory of sex motivation, so that was cut from most therapies now. Most people now do not have the client’s lay on a couch like Freud did, now they sit in chair, or at least sit up on a couch instead of laying down. Therapy also moves along with the different theories of psychology as well. For instance, although we did not talk much about it gestalt psychology has its own therapy that is model after the ideas of the theory. Out of all the therapies I had learned in my class this therapy was my least favorite, however when were actually learned about gestalt psychology in this class I didn’t think it was that bad. Fritz Perls was the creator of gestalt therapy and he was a very cold and almost seemed like a mean therapist, whereas now the therapists are much more like a friend. Perls would push people, but not necessarily in a positive way to get them motivated. Modern gestalt therapy puts much more emphasis on the client-therapist relationship which is very healthy. Then there is behavioral therapy which is used a lot now for treating phobias. Joseph Wolpe was able to take the ideas of Mary Cover Jones and her direct conditioning and use those ideas to form a technique for therapy. Although they weren’t covered cognitive therapy had two great therapists as well, Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck. Aaron Beck was really the first person to really discover that depression is correlated with negative thinking. So he felt to treat depression the client will need to change their thinking. It’s a task that the client must do, the therapist can not change the ideas of a client, so hopefully by the end of therapy the client would have more rational thinking.
Carl Rogers created client-centered therapy. He felt the need to make the client the expert on their own life and the client is the one who controls the outcome of therapy. Rogers felt that if practitioners did three basic things that this therapy could be successful. The therapist must be genuine, they must be themselves. This was very different from Freud. Freud felt that the therapist must act a certain way, but now the therapist is free to be themselves but still maintain some professionalism. If the therapist is really showing who they are the client is more likely to open up. The therapist must also have an unconditional positive regard for the client. They should care about the client and not judge the clients choices or behavior. The therapist should also have empathy for the client. They should try and see situations from the client’s point of view. So the therapist should reflect on the client and their choices. Therapy became much more optimistic.
I believe that knowing the different therapies and how they have changed helps us recognize how psychology and the ideas of psychology have changed as well. Right now cognitive-behavioral therapy is very popular and so is that field of psychology as well. Therapy is constantly changing in order to get the best results for the clients. We need to know what therapies don’t seem to work, and the therapies that can actually make a difference. This helps us grow as therapists to become more effective to future clients.
What realm of psychology was of most interest to you and why?
There were several topics that I found interesting. I did really enjoy learning about school psychology and the different people who seemed to contribute to that. Although I am not a teaching major, I am thinking about becoming a school psychologist and so I think that this topic was interesting for me because of that. I would really love to work in the school system, but I don’t think being a teacher would be the right fit for me. The person I really liked learning about who was also interested in education was John Dewey. He had some very modern ideas for the classroom and really seemed to think out of the box and I really enjoyed learning about that. His prime was 100 years ago, but his ideas are still relevant even now and I just think that makes it very interesting. He was the head of a movement called progressive education. He didn’t like the traditional approach to teaching and felt that it restricted the students from really learning the material. He also felt that there were many adversive things in the classroom, and not many parts that really encouraged learning. I know in bmod we talked about eliminating the adversives in the classroom and trying to focus on the positives and make the room friendlier for reinforcements in learning. He felt the education and learning was just drilled into student’s head, educators wanted students to memorize or know the information right away, rather than discovering the information on their own and reaching their own conclusions. This way of teaching really doesn’t encourage questions or curiosity. Because of this Dewey created his own laboratory school and focused on the students and tried to discover how students learn best. He discovered in the studies that student’s learn best be interacting with their environment. So students are best at learning by doing “hands on” activities. So he wanted to encourage curiosity and creativity.
I feel like it’s great that I know all this material, but I won’t really know what to do with it until I’m able to apply it to the people I work with. I will be entering a field experience next semester and I like many other people feel like I have no idea what I am doing and feel like I haven’t learned enough at school, but I know that when I am doing my internship that things I have learned in the classroom will hopefully start to come through and be used. This internship will really be the true test of what I’ve learned in my four years of college. I will finally be getting the hands on experience I need in order to apply my knowledge. I’m so glad that my major requires this field experience before I actually have a job otherwise I really would be at a loss for what to do. I’m surprised more fields do not require an internship or some type of experience before graduation. It would benefit students in so many ways.
Even now we do not really seem to encourage hands on learning. I have always been a hands on learner and I always did well in science classes where that was expected. I overall liked those classes a lot more than my English and math classes because I actually got to “do” what we would talk about. We could ask those tough questions and we could hold fire in our hands using soap. We learned how to do those things in science class, but in any other type of class critical thinking and hands on learning didn’t happen. Even in history classes we didn’t ask why the Romans did this or this, it just happened and that was what we had to know. I didn’t really ask questions or think critically until high school and college. It’s almost like questions really just weren’t encouraged at all. Professors wonder why students don’t critically think, and it’s just because our teachers in middle school and high school didn’t want that. Those teachers want us to do everything by the book and by the answers they gave us, they don’t want us to ask why. This is one of the reason why I really enjoyed this class. I could ask those tough questions and try to challenge myself to find the answer. This help us use our own resources to find the answers to questions that we’re interesting in and want to learn more about. It just really encourages learning and critically thinking. If students had classes like this starting in middle school it would significantly help them in their high school years. They would be challenged and that’s not a bad thing at all.
How would you apply this class to your everyday life?
The great thing about psychology is that it is the study of people so it can easily be applied to everyday life since we’re constantly around other people for the most part. A lot of what we learn in this class may not only be applied to other people, but to ourselves as well. We can conduct our own self experiments and be the participant in our own mini study.
I feel like many students can relate to the studies conducted about memory and things like the forgetting curve especially when it comes to information for certain classes. With some classes we cram in all of our studying and then the information doesn’t stick in our brains. However with other classes we read the chapters throughout the class and pay attention to the material and maybe we even take notes on the material, so the material is repeated again and again, so we actually learn the material. So the information learned in these types of classes actually sticks with us and we use it again. Hermann Ebbinghaus did a lot of work with memory and studied repetition. With classes there’s a lot of information that would be covered for a test, so it’s important to keep review the material so you can actually retain it. Ebbinghaus discovered that it takes more repetition to learn more information. He also discovered that when the information was seven syllables or less that is was very easy to remember. He also did some research on the savings method which talks about memory throughout time. In those classes where I memorize the material for a test, but then don’t use it after it is memorized, I will forget it. If I keep using the information that I used I will remember it. So if I can learn to keep repeating important information I have learned and to keep using it rather than not, I should be more successful in the test of real-life application of my schooling.
This can even be applied to the information I learn in this class. Since these chapters did seem to build on each other the information was repeated over time and will probably stay with me for a while. However if during my internship next semester I don’t think about any of the information I learned in this class or anything and I was asked again to write a final blog, it would not be as detailed and it would cover much less material. There are many classes that I have forgotten about in my college career, however there are many others that I thought would never apply to my life or even to other psych classes I would take, but they did and I was wrong. It will be a lot harder next semester to retain information from school since I will be doing a field experience, but hopefully what I have learned in school will be able to be applied to the job.
There however are many other ways I can apply this class to my everyday life. In this class we talked a lot about asking those big questions and really overall just thinking critically about psychology and the people involved. This is something I can do in my everyday life. I can ask tough questions to my friends and family. I can also try and ask tough questions to my advisors for my internship and also my field liaison. Questions are something we can use no matter what. I will do my best to remember to ask those hard questions and try to absorb as much information as possible, especially while working at my field experience. For an internship it’s important to learn as much as you can, so I will try to do that.
Another way to apply this class is that in this class we see how much the field of psychology has grown and evolved and changed. We see that ideas that once were thought to be correct are now not studied anymore and are not popular. We also see how small ideas that were touched on in the past, have evolved and grown into major theories such as behaviorism. There were ideas that people had that almost predicted the future of psychology, but at the time they were viewed as ridiculous ideas and now they are important. So I guess I will take with me that life is always changing and the theories are always evolving and growing. Some become popular and others are ideas that no one else in the field values so they are shot down. It doesn’t mean that idea won’t become popular later. It doesn’t mean that popular idea or theory was right. I guess in a way I realize that even if I have a same idea about psychology or a theory that I think may work, it may be an idea that in my time doesn’t fit, but 100 years later it may be the next big theory. I’m constantly coming up with new ideas and this just tells me that that’s a really good thing and that idea could become the future of psychology. We cannot predict where the future of psychology is going, or what may come next and learning about the history of psychology just proves it. The future of psychology has so many factors related to it, just like a person with a mental illness has many other factors contributing as well. The future of psychology is related to the events that happen at that time. It’s related to wars or environmental disasters, it’s related to technology. There’s just so many factors that psychology plays off of that we can’t yet determine what the future will be like. So from this class I have learned to keep coming up with questions and ideas because life is unpredictable and you never know what might happen.
Key words: Hermann Ebbinghaus, Historicism, savings method, forgetting curve, school psychology, John Dewey, progressive education, laboratory school, gestalt psychology, freud, psychoanalysis, free association, resistant, defense mechanisms, Fritz Perls, Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, individual psychology, analytic psychology, individuation, Joseph Wolpe, Mary Cover Jones, direct conditioning, systematic desensitization, Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis, Carl Rogers, Client-centered therapy,
The first question that caught my eye when preparing to write this blog was, in 50-100 years from now, how much of the present psychology will still be influential?
To me this is a very intriguing question because psychology, much like many of the scientific fields, is an ever changing science that is continually being developed, researched and studied. One of the advantages of studying psychology is the unknown of the mind. Many different fields are present within the category of psychology today and basically all of them were unheard of 100 years ago. In the last century psychology went from the basement cellar to the penthouse, it is a widely used and studied profession among numerous people. Psychology has come a long way in a few short time, as far as scientific fields go, the credit can be given to some of the original innovators who began experimenting, testing and eventually treating people. Today however, very few of the treatments and methods used 100 years ago are no longer influential because the research or methods have been explored and further developed by others interested in psychology. I would expect the same to happen in the next 50-100 years.
I believe many of the techniques used in psychology like behavior modification, psychoanalysis and intelligence testing will be around for much longer, others however have not been able to stand the test of time. Sadly some of the methods used today to treat people and study our environment will be thrown out in the future because something newer and more effect has been developed. It is hard to speculate what will and will not stand the test of time, tomorrow a new form of psychology could completely revolutionize the way we look at the field and change everything.
Another big reason psychology has developed so fast is technology. Today we are able to see deeper into the brain and in much better detail which in turn allows us to map the different parts and decipher how it works and how it controls our thoughts and emotions. It is my belief that this will eventually be the tool that allows us to unlock even more knowledge and understanding about ourselves and how to treat and care for individuals with mental problems. In response to will present psychology still be relevant 50-100 years from now, yes but, even if it is not used it is always important to go back and look at techniques that have been attempted to gain a better perspective of where to go in the future. My hope is that in 100 years we will have completely different techniques that are much more affective and accurate at diagnosing or treating individuals.
How would you apply this class to your everyday life?
One of the wonderful things about psychology is that you study people so it can easily be applied to everyday life unless you are on a deserted island. Every day we constantly interact with numerous individuals whether it be at school, work or home. This class can apply to everyday life by helping to understand certain situations and encounters we might find ourselves in over the course of our daily lives. Many of the people we studied in class never even wanted to be psychologist, many were just curious about different stimuli in their environment and asked the question why? The class did a great job of building off each chapter and tying them all together to help me as a student remember more of the techniques used to become more self-aware of thoughts and emotions. These chapters did seem to build on each other and information was repeated over time and will probably stay with me much longer. Another way this class can apply to everyday life is by showing students to never quit asking questions. As we learned throughout the semester, psychology is every changing and has been continually moving forward for a very long time. This class can apply to any prospective psychology enthusiast who wants to make their mark on the field. Many of the people we learned about throughout the semester took other research that interested them and expanded on it or even developed it further into completely new branches of psychology.
What realm of psychology was of most interest to you? Why?
While there are many realms of psychology that are very interesting and offer tons of information the one that interested me was psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a set of psychological and psychotherapeutic theories and techniques to help treat patients. The most famous man to use psychoanalysis and the man who originally popularized it was the Austrian physician Sigmund Freud. While Freud was a medical student he had no intentions of practicing medicine, which says a lot to just how intelligent the man was. Since Freud first started creating psychoanalysis in the late 1800s, it has expanded and been revised, reformed and developed in different directions. One of the most interesting things about psychoanalysis is the number of different techniques available. Under the broad category of psychoanalysis there are at least 22 theoretical directions concerning human mental development.
Freud was most famous for refers to a more specific type of treatment in which the patient discusses thoughts, fantasies, and dreams. Freud then encouraged the unconscious conflicts causing the patient's symptoms and character problems, and interprets them for the patient to create insight on how to resolve of the problems. Freud was famous for confronting and clarifying the patient's uncontrolled defenses, wishes and guilt. Another reason I find psychoanalysis interesting is because Freud thought through the analysis of conflicts, psychoanalytic treatment can hypothesize how patients unconsciously are their own worst enemies. Freud thought people often held onto memories from their childhood or past that might be aversive to their lives. He also used dream analysis as a method to explore the unconscious. He first began using dream analysis because he wanted to use psychoanalysis on himself and was searching for a way into his unconscious. He also believed that dreams were a form of disguised wishes, he expanded his research on this to include a process called dream work. The latent content of the dream was transformed through symbolism and later explained by Freud what the dream may represent. Freud argued that dreams could be the door to unlocking and understanding our own genuine unconscious wishes. Today psychoanalysis is less widely accepted but several meta-analyses have shown psychoanalysis and the psychodynamic therapy to be effective, with outcomes comparable or greater than other kinds of psychotherapy or antidepressant drugs.
Terms: behavior modification, psychoanalysis, intelligence testing, Sigmund Freud, dream analysis, psychodynamic therapy, aversive
I would have to say that it is true that we study history to learn from our mistakes. If you think about it if we didn’t know what they did in the past then we would just be continuing to attempt things that either a) people have already done/discovered so nothing really new is being learned or b) we are doing something that has already proven not to be true or even make an advance in the field. It is not only learning mistakes though, it is learning the struggles of those before us. If it wasn’t for the early philosophers risking their lives to think outside of the box then psychology as we know it today wouldn’t be what it is. It was those first few people who started the movement to believe outside of the Church then no one would’ve even tried. Even though most of them waited to publish their ideas and theories until after they passed away but it was the fact that they shared these ideas and it got more and more people to think. Then there is Sigmund Freud, the man that helped found psychology. Freud this is one of the first where you can say that we learn from our mistakes, you could see when he worked with Anna O, he took what he saw wrong with her treatment before and moved it in a different direction. It was in working with Anna O that he discovered psychoanalysis and began to use it. Psychoanalysis was something one of the first forms of therapy, it was a little harsh but that was Freud for you. All of his ideas and treatments tended to be a little out there. It was when the neo-freudian period came along and Carl Jung saw that Freud’s ideas were a little too much out there and were also harsh, so instead he wanted a way to understand the patients while interacting with them. If it wasn’t for seeing that Freud’s treatments not working on everyone though that the neo-freudians wouldn’t have broken away from psychoanalysis. The neo-freudians were more interested in the person though, having more of a humane relationship and more down to earth theories such as the stages of development not being so sexual and everything appearing so negative about how the human mind is. There was still the conscious and unconscious which Freud had explained but instead of there being negatives to everything that people do there was positives. The neo-freudians created theories of the desires of the unconscious influencing the conscious mind. There were still stages of development but instead of having the sexual basis, they were more focused on the individual’s accomplishments during those time periods, such as the trust vs. mistrust and so on. When the Behaviorist’s came in though was when things really changed. Instead of always seeing things as being in the mind, and there being brain problems they discovered that there were actual things that could be understood about individuals by watching what they do and how they react. So by the psychologist’s making the mistake that everything uncontrolled lives in the unconscious we were able to learn that people actually learn conditional responses to situations. It was learned that when there is a specific stimuli there tends to be a specific response to it due to the exposure over time. That is where Ivan Pavlov’s Conditional Response experiment with the dogs began. If it wasn’t for the Freudian’s and neo-fruedians making the mistake that everything lives in the unconscious then the behaviorists wouldn’t have learned that some things are just conditional and that positive and negative reinforcements can actually change behaviors. There was then the great problem of the lobotomy that came about. This was one of the biggest mistakes that occurred in psychological history. The sad part is though that originally developed in order to help people and it did, when it was performed correctly, it just took two people who were looking to get rich more than they were looking to help people that drove the lobotomy to the ground and all of the people lobotomized with it. It was from this mistake though that we learned that yeah, scrambling people frontal lobes does not help everyone and it can actually desensitize them but it was learned that the frontal lobe has a lot to do with people emotions and reactions to situations, furthering our knowledge. This can be seen with the Asylums too, originally they were created to put away people who were deemed crazy and mistreated by society or were even a danger to society. Putting them away and locking them up, abusing them and seeing them as nothing more than an uncontrollable animal. The problem was though that they were people, they just needed the right amount of help. It wasn’t until the reforms came about the psychologists were able to actually work with the insane of that time and found ways to calm them. So from the mistake of just locking them away and treating them as animals, which the reformers found to be inhumane, that they were able to actually begin working with people with mental illnesses and find ways to help them though interactions with them and removing them from the harsh society outside the Asylums. There is a lot of cruelty in the history of psychology, that has made it what it is today. It is learning from these mistakes though that has made psychology what it is, without the struggles of those before us we wouldn’t know what we do today. There were a lot of mistakes that were made from the way that therapy should be administered to patients to treatment of the patients whether it be the tragedy of the lobotomy or the isolation they received in the beginning. It is from these mistakes though that today people that would’ve been locked away many years ago are now able to be medicated in a way to live and function in everyday society.
Terms: Sigmund Freud, Anna O, Psychoanalysis, Carl Jung, Conditional responses, Ivan Pavlov, Positive reinforcements, Negative reinforcements, Asylums
I think the reason why we study history is to make an attempt to not follow the same mistakes that we have made in the past. So I would say this statement is true. Just within the topics we have discussed in the class and that have been covered in the book have shown how we have made changes through analyzing and learning from the mistakes of the initial practices some psychologists have tried. This is evident in how the initial concepts of phrenology and eugenics have been proven wrong, and how the IQ test is a perceived measurement of intelligence, but doesn’t account for bias or prejudice. This is also evident in the techniques that are no longer being practiced such as catharsis, bloodletting, and lobotomies. Yet the clearest example of learning from our mistakes is in the concept of trial and error learning itself.
To begin, the example of phrenology, once believed to be able to measure intelligence by the size of one’s brain is now considered a pseudoscience since it can’t be proven. Phrenology was one of the first attempts to study the brain in a biological aspect that affects our psychological and cognitive function. Into the 19th Century it became pseudoscience. One of the biggest myths that phrenologists believed was that you could determine one’s intelligence by the size of one’s brain. Phrenology points out that there are lesions, so the thought was that each different lesion became a different function in the brain. Technically this is right but phrenologists started to make up different areas for what they did without scientific evidence to back it up. They attributed different functions such as time and causality, comparison, human nature, and spirituality to these lesions. We have made advancements since then. Today we can identify what different regions of the brain does on a basic level. However, even today we still do not know everything that phrenology claimed. For example, we still don’t know the exact functions of each region such as each emotional state we come across, like self-esteem. Today we don’t think it is one particular region that operates and is solely responsible for a particular attribute such as self-esteem, etc. We actually know it is broader and think it is more probable that neurotransmitters signal each other through the limbic system for emotional regulation rather trying to claim a specific emotional function on each lesion or area in the brain. Phrenology was claimed to be science, but instead is considered a pseudoscience because it lacks proof. Therefore, it can’t be recognized as science because it is hasn’t been proven through scientific evidence. This is an example of how we learned through history, expanding on the initial practice and concept of phrenology.
Another example is eugenics. We have probably learned the most from our past from the history of psychology with eugenics. It was right after Charles Darwin that someone thought to use the theory of evolution with humans. In fact it was Darwin’s half cousin Francis Galton who came up with the concept of applying evolution to humans and how it affects humans with traits such as intelligence. Galton believed that intelligence was an inherent trait that it was possible that it was mostly determined by genetics. Eugenics was a term to promote the idea that society should take active steps toward improving its genetic material. This concept was actually promoted, but resulted in very grave consequences. One example is how Hitler after writing his book Mein Kampf or in English, My Struggle, started to hate the Jews. After winning political campaigns and becoming the leader of Germany, he became obsessed with genetics and the idea of eugenics. Ironically, he eventually developed the idea that if the world would only consist of what he viewed as the “perfect race and society” that peace would be the outcome. While most people would blame Hitler’s insane actions on the fact that he had syphilis or used methamphetamines, but in a sense, eugenics was a contributing factor to Hitler’s method of madness with very tragic outcomes.
Eugenics has also affected psychologists’ earlier views toward mentally handicap people. For example, some psychologists thought they should not reproduce while other psychologists thought they should be segregated from society. Some of these ideas had both positive and negative effects. For example, some psychologists thought one positive way segregation could benefit handicapped people is in school where they can learn with people that have similar abilities or challenges. One benefit was the idea that segregation would help by not slowing down “regular” students. Additionally, it was thought that it would have a similar benefit on handicap people by not disrupting or slowing down their learning with the “regular people” making fun of them and decreasing their self-esteem. There are additional reasons that I believe we study history to learn from the past. Some of the things we have learned from eugenics are the consequences that can arise from such a perceived belief. Also now we do not necessarily think that intelligence is due to pure genetics. Genetics may be able to have some form of probability on an individual but intelligence itself seems to have more to do with environmental factors. For example, two people who are not biologically or mentally handicapped can produce a child that is mentally handicapped such as Down Syndrome, that is caused by an extra chromosome. There also doesn’t seem to be a family where every family member is handicapped or mentally handicapped, so there has to be another contributing factor than just purely genetics.
Another environmental factor could be socioeconomic status. For example, Galton grew up in one of the richest parts of society and was old money. This was a contributing factor to that made Galton believe in eugenics. A poor person has to work long hours and try to go to school at the same time if they wanted an education. In contrast, a rich person can just focus on school without wondering if they have enough food to eat and survive. In a sense the rich person doesn’t have to work as hard since they don’t have to work to ensure their basic needs are met, they have the money to make sure they are met. We still have this concept of the difference of rich and poor people today but I think it is not as prejudice as it was in the past. For the most part I feel we have learned from mistakes of eugenics. Therefore, eugenics is an example of how we study history to learn any mistakes we made in the past, so they don't happen again in the present and future.
Another example of how we have learned from the past is the prejudice toward women. Women were considered inferior to men intellectually as well. They were often discriminated in the workplace. Reading through the Modern Psychology book I have noticed that there were not a lot of women psychologists during the late 1800 to early 1900. In the past, men were very prejudice toward women that they would not work with them at all. They would even give up their position in a research lab with a famous psychologist just because a woman was allowed to join. All jobs were like this because society previously viewed a woman’s job was to be a mother, take care of the kids, cook and focus only on taking care of the whole family. This is also an example of learning from history. Since then, we have learned that women are capable of doing most work that men do.
The IQ test is also an example of how we might be able to learn from our past. The IQ test was created in the 1910’s. Psychologists like Henry Goddard made up concepts such as mental age, and Alfred Binet made the concept of mental level. First Alfred Binet made the concept mental level to determine what people’s intelligence levels were. After that Binet noticed that in general, a five year old would correspond to a five year old intellectual level. Then Henry Goddard developed the concept of mental age. This is where psychologists tried to subject people to an average mental age with their mental level of intelligible capability. If a person had a lower level of mental capacity than their actual age they would be labeled derogatorily with labels such as moron. Today, words like moron and retard are considered an insult. You would think that the only reason it is an insult is only because of what the word means. No matter what, if you use words within the same concept it is going to have the same consequence or outcome. If you called someone retarded in a derogatory way, and someone else called someone mentally handicapped in a derogatory way wouldn’t it be similar on the emotional level? It might make sense as to come up with such ideas about mental age and mental level in the first place that is where the originated segregation came from and is worse than just using a word such as moron or retard. But today we claim that just using the words is what is harmful but in reality it is how you use the words. Making an IQ test in general is completely subjective and has no definite way of determining ones intelligence. A doctor has different knowledge than a physicist or even an engineer. As people, we are limited to the knowledge we personally experience and do with our lives. Therefore, the IQ test is another example of how we study history to learn any mistakes we made in the past, so they don't happen again in the present and future. Such as labeling mental ages and levels before thinking what the outcome of labeling can have.
In the same way we have learned that different concepts like phrenology, eugenics, and prejudices were wrong, we have also learned that some of the initial practices actually performed on patients were actually wrong, unfortunately, there have been actual techniques and procedures that were done on patients as well. For example, there were a lot of techniques for trying to cure mental illness in the past that we have learned from. Two very dangerous techniques include bloodletting and lobotomies. The idea of bloodletting came about because it was believed that there was a hypertension in the brain’s blood vessels. By reducing the tension they opened the veins and drained the blood until the person reached a tranquil state. It worked temporarily. They did this mainly to calm violent patients. To do techniques like this today, is prohibited and the ethics board would think you were the one insane. They also used the technique of lobotomies. A lobotomy is where the physician tries to cut the pathway where your prefrontal cortex is connected to your limbic system. It was a procedure would decrease your ambition to do anything and your motivation would be minimized almost to the point of complete apathy. Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949 to make the lobotomy procedure. Freeman was a physician who made the lobotomies more popular. They usually used this treatment on patients who were violent. Some patients even willingly wanted a lobotomy. Today we have stopped using lobotomies and have started using drugs that pretty much did the same thing but probably to a lesser degree. I wonder if in the future we will deem the pharmaceutical drugs used today as unethical. They already outlawed some pharmaceutical drugs that used to be legal such as heroin, meth, cocaine, and opium.
There were other techniques that we have learned from also, such as catharsis. Breuer made the method of Catharsis. Catharsis is where you try to release your anger or get rid of your negative emotions on something else rather than on what is causing you to get angry or have negative emotions. Initially, when this technique was first used, it worked. Most patients felt good using stuff like a punching bag and yelling at it as if it were their boss or the person that is pissing them off. Now we have been shown that this technique works temporarily but when you are not worn out releasing your anger sometimes more aggressive thoughts can enter your head when you get mad at someone. So we have learned that in the short term this technique would work. However, for the long term this technique would not be as effective.
Finally, one of the most basic examples of how we study psychology to learn from our mistakes is in the concept of trial and error learning. There has also been some research that psychologists have conducted to try to show how trial and error learning works. Thorndike was one of those psychologists. He would experiment with animals and put them in mazes or boxes. Thorndike found that animals can learn from making a wrong mistake and then changing their initial action to try to get at the end of the maze or out of the trapped box they are in. If other animals can learn from this then we as humans can also learn from this same technique. It can also be used as evidence that we do in fact learn from our mistakes we make in the past. Otherwise how would you know personally that such an action would create an outcome that is undesirable or not? Therefore, I believe trial and error learning is an example of how we study history to learn from mistakes we made in the past, so they don't happen again in the present and future. If we study history we can learn mistakes that our ancestors or people in the past had made so we don’t have to make them personally.
In conclusion, there are many topics and reasons of how we learn from our mistakes and history shows that. Otherwise we would never learn anything for the future, without learning anything from the past and present. Most of our lives are learning through our experiences. If we were to be born with the intelligence of knowing everything, there would be no reason to experience anything. Without experiencing anything there wouldn’t be much point to life it would seem.
Lobotomies:
Catharsis:
Bloodletting:
Myths about women
Trial and error Learning Thorndike
Eugenics pg 154 Francis Galton
Phrenology pg 71-75
IQ tests and mental age, moron.Henry Goddard and Alfred Binet
While we study history to review its mistakes, more often than not, thought is not nearly enough to keep them from repeating themselves. It is only with action, a byproduct of thought, that when exercised properly allows for old mistakes to no longer exist and we as a society are able to move forward. Unfortunately, the act of progression is difficult to do alone, especially the progression of a science such as a psychology. Throughout A History of Modern Psychology, by C. James Goodwin, there is a subtle key point made that psychology was as popular as it was today due to the assistance of one man, but rather a multitude of contributions made by men and women from across the world, all in the pursuit of an expansion of knowledge and fortification of their passions for psychology.
From tragic cases such as Phineas Gage to struggles to find a place in a workforce that undermines an individual based off gender such as Eleanor Gibson’s case, there is a lot of good that come from misfortune. Gage’s injury had led to the discovery of the importance of the frontal lobe, Gibson’s triumph over his misogynist co-workers led to the very popular psychology experiment of the Visual-Cliff, both cases required not only extreme determination to create a different path for themselves, but also an extreme desire for more than what was given to them. I believe that history serves more purpose than to just learn from it, but to recognize and imitate the character traits that led to historical events like these and others, to be daring to be the ones who make history, not just be a part of it. Unfortunately, not every bad case ends with completely fortunate events such as the state of mental health institutes.
Although today’s treatment is far less brutal and inhumane than the early stages of mental health treatment, it still has far to go until it can be viewed as adequate by today’s standards. Not to mention that mental health issues are often regarded as less serious as physical illness or disabilities, despite the advancement of technology that has allowed us to begin making correlations, if not actual causations for certain illnesses such as neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin being linked to schizophrenia and depression – society as a whole still has far to go in maturation as does mental health institutes have far to go in improvements as well, I suppose. Dorothea Dix’s campaign to reform early asylums was a strong endeavor and step in the right direction, bringing light to the alarming level of abuse and neglect of the mentally ill. But the constant portrayal of schizophrenics as murderers, over-abuse of the word “depression”, and overall downplay of mental health as a serious illness by not only the media, but television, movies, and even casual conversation is what confines our society to its current state. And while it’s hard to move forward, it’s nice to see careful consideration of uttering the word “retard” in class as perhaps that’s all it takes, to be considerate of others.
Without a doubt, letting go of bias when looking back at history is hard, as most of us aren’t able to let go of bias in present conversations. Another essential point that the book makes is that it is important to use a combination of both presentist and historicist viewpoints when learning about the material being presented, as being able to see from both perspectives allows a much deeper, well-thought out representation of the event. By applying historical context of the time period, we can begin to perhaps not justify, but to make some logical sense out of irrational actions such as bloodletting. By taking an event or action and placing it in our own time, we can see how far we’ve come as intellectuals by examining the absurdity or primitive technology of the time. But it is difficult when bias already lays within us, prior to the new material, we see things that anger us, that block our vision and taint our thought processes. For me, it is the poor treatment of the weak, the mentally ill, the minorities, the women, the underdogs, that strike a sensitive nerve, but it allows me to make a connection and find out what matters to me and what gives me a small clue about what kind of person I want to be as I figure it out in college.
Throughout the history of psychology, we run into many interesting events and even more interesting people, such as Freud’s crazy Oedipus complex and Witmer’s creation of the first real mental health clinic, it is hard to figure out what to do with the knowledge. But perhaps the examination of history is not to avoid repeating past mistakes, but to correct them by expanding and adding to a never ending database of knowledge and contributions. The knowledge attained from reading about history should be applied, using our own lives as an experimental process in hopes of discovering new findings that will create history similar to those we read about.
terms: phineas gage, eleanor gibson, sigmund freud, visual cliff, schizophrenia, depression, dorothea dix, presentist, historicist, bloodletting, oedipus complex, witmer