Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson's psychodynamic theories

Sigmund Freud & Erik Erikson's psychodynamic theories

Freud and Erikson: Nature vs. nurture and critical developmental stages

Freud and Erikson: Nature vs. nurture and critical developmental stages

For many years, the theories of Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson dominated how human psychological and social development was conceptualized in the minds of educators and therapists. Today, particularly with the greater influence of psychopharmacology, purely biological rather than psychologically-driven models have become more popular in the academic community. The approaches of Freud and Erikson are longer as fashionable as they once were in the 20th century. But their views of developmental maturity and their notion that different stages of development were characterized by certain time-sensitive conflicts that had to be resolved for the good of the individual's psychological health still influences the thinking of many laypersons and professionals alike.

Sigmund Freud was one of the first individuals to suggest that mental states were not purely rooted in biological causes. In Freud's day, one of the dominant complaints, particularly amongst women, was hysteria or paralysis of one of the patient's limbs with no known cause. Freud postulated that unresolved trauma would manifest itself in physical symptoms. Freud suggested that the mind was just as powerful an influence upon physical health as the body. "Although Freud certainly included considerations of constitution and predisposition [nature] in his concepts of causality, his initial theory of psychopathology, such as hysteric or obsessive-compulsive symptoms, was one of a repressed actual childhood sexual trauma, the effects of which were subsequently rekindled at puberty or later and expressed in the form of [physical] symptoms" (Wiener, 2000, p.1194).

Erik Erikson, much like Freud, adopted a multi-stage theory of human development. But while Freud postulated that development and socialization were primarily ways of controlling human sexual impulses within social constructs, Erikson proposed a more complicated, multi-tiered developmental process. Unlike Freud, Erikson believed that sexual impulses were not the only conflicts within the child's developing psyche: a desire for autonomy, for example, was equally important at most stages of development.

Freud's most famous contribution to the study of development is his theory of the Oedipus Complex, which suggests that after a period of polymorphous perversity, or the ability to be sexually stimulated by a number of undifferentiated means, the child begins to desire the mother as its first love object. In the case of a boy, he begins to despise and feel murderously towards his father as a rival for the mother's affection, while the young girl begins to resent the mother for making her 'incomplete' (without a penis) and tries to 'have' her father as a way of 'having' what she lacks. Eventually, the girl tries to resemble her mother to win her father -- and other males' affection. The boy tries to seem like his father to please the opposite-sex parent. Coming to sexual maturity for Freud was thus a traumatic process of negotiating a 'family romance' and disturbances could create psychological wounds that would result in difficulties later on. Although biology clearly had an influence upon the child in terms of their sexual status, Freud's philosophy is usually viewed as stressing nurture, or experiences, over nature: the unconscious mind affects the body and actions of the individual in the present.