Key concepts and applications from coursework

Psychology

Psychoanalysis is a theory that was developed by Sigmund Freud that is all about human nature and what motivates and causes people to behave in certain ways. Psychoanalysis primarily deals with the unconscious mind as Freud believed that people often act and feel things for reasons that they are completely unaware of. Freud essentially used psychoanalysis to dig into the patient's mind as an archaeologist may dig into the earth (Mitchell & Black 1996, p. 1) to uncover meaning. Freud used psychoanalytic interpretations to uncover what was lurking deep in the minds of his patients. Freud sought to expose the underlying structure of the human mind.

One of Freud's biggest contributions to psychoanalytic thought was his psychosexual stages that he believed each individual went through: the oral stage, the anal stage, the phallic stage, latency, and the genital stage. This was the core of Freud's personality development theory and each stage has to do with the sexual drives of the individual. At certain times in the development of the personality, Freud believe, one body part is more sensitive to sexual stimulation. Those areas are outlined in the aforementioned stages (mouth, anus, and genital region). The idea is that the child cannot progress in a healthy manner, developmentally speaking, if he or she becomes fixated at a certain stage.

How does intelligence come to be? Piaget (2001) states that every single psychological explanation will come to be because of something either biological or something that has to do with logic. While this seems pretty concrete, it is actually quite abstract. How do we define what intelligence is? What makes someone intelligent and how do we measure intelligence between different people? For some, intelligence may be one general thing, while for other, intelligence may be a package or a bundle of talents or knowledge. Piaget focused more on biological aspects when considering intelligence and pretty much ignored all other fields when studying it (for example, psychoanalysis and pathological psychology). However, intelligence, it seems, can't just be looked at through one lens and today more psychologists actually consider and utilize many different theories when discussing intelligence.

The terms classical and operant conditioning came out of the behaviorism school of psychology. Behaviorism is a school of psychology that basically assumes that any kind of learning happens because of one's interactions with the their surroundings. This means that the environment that a person is in will have a major effect on how the react. It also means that people don't have free will necessarily because behaviorism believes that feelings and thoughts don't cause people to behave in certain ways. Classical conditioning can be best understood by the example of Pavlov's dogs. Pavlov's dogs were discovered salivating by the mere sound of the people with food coming rather. In other words, they were reacting to a neutral stimulus. Operant conditioning, on the other hand, is more about reward and punishment (Donaldson 2008). Operant conditioning works because sometimes the subject is rewarded and sometimes not and this has found to be very successful (the most successful, in fact) in conditioning. For example, if one sometimes gives dogs food off their plate and sometimes not, the dog will be conditioned to wait always for the food because sometimes he gets it.

The term 'mental illness' is a culturally bound term. What is considered a mental illness in western culture may not be considered a mental illness in eastern countries. For example, anorexia is a common mental illness in the United States, but it does not exist in certain parts of the world. Also, some mental illnesses may be more accepted in parts of the world rather than in others, so using the term 'mental illness' must be used carefully as it does not mean the same thing to everybody all across the world.