Reference specifications and technical requirements

Psychology - Personality

PSYCHOANALYSIS, HUMANISM and EXISTENTIALISM

Psychoanalysis:

Classical psychoanalysis originated with Sigmund Freud in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. According to Freud, much of outward human behavior is, in fact, driven by completely subconscious urges and fears and repressed emotions. Freud also considered the sexual urge as a major motivation in human behavior and emphasized the importance of the parent-child relationship as the source of psychological difficulties in adulthood. The psychoanalytic method introduced by Freud consisted of conversations between therapist and patient wherein the therapist sought clues to the patient's medical complaints in the subconscious memories of the patient.

The foundational basis of Freud's psychoanalytic approach is that the human mind protects the individual from troubling emotions by suppressing potentially traumatic experiences and memories from conscious awareness. It was Freud's belief that the energy devoted to keeping repressed emotions from emerging into conscious awareness results in medical symptoms without physical causes, to which he referred as psychosomatic illness.

The general concept behind psychoanalytic therapy is that identifying the original traumatic emotions and resolving them with the guidance of the therapist is the key to treating the outward manifestations of those repressed traumatic emotions and memories.

Psychoanalytic theory does not address the general beliefs of individuals outside of the realm of the internal psyche.

Humanism:

Humanism is a philosophy of objective ethics that absolutely rejects any religious rules or definitions of human conduct and affairs. Instead, the humanist point-of-view is that people are capable of deriving principles such as "right" and "wrong" and of formulating social rules by objective logical reasoning without any reference to divine sources, cultural myths, or autocratic authority.

Humanism conceives of "goodness" as an inherent natural potential quality of all people and suggests that the goal of human society should be healthy and prosperous growth not dissimilar from the biblical instruction to "be fruitful and multiply" except without any supernatural origin of that goal. Humanism takes the position that the human intellect is sufficient to deduce moral principles and that all human beings have the same natural right to dignity and personal autonomy.

The humanistic perspective does not absolutely reject the underlying principles of psychoanalytical theory, but places more focus on conscious self-reflection than on any assumption that the roots of all human conduct is necessarily a function of repressed trauma, sexual urges, and unresolved psychological conflicts. Humanism also rejects anthropocentrism in that it does not consider human life to be different in kind from other biological life forms, but only different in degree of development and complexity.

Existentialism:

Existentialism rejects many of the same concepts as humanism in the realm of religious or supernatural sources of human morality. Whereas humanists start with an assumption that human beings are inherently good and that the prosperity of human societies is necessarily good, existentialism recognizes no such assumption.