Freud vs. Skinner: Psychoanalysis and Behaviorism Compared

Introduction: Two Irreconcilable Visions of Psychology

Sigmund Freud and B.F. Skinner are two of the most important theorists in the history of psychology, but perhaps no two thinkers have developed psychological systems that clash more vehemently with one another. Both men would have profoundly disagreed on the most basic question of what psychology's fundamental function is. Sigmund Freud focused on a conception of psychology known as psychoanalysis, in which he claimed that an observer could learn about elements of someone's mental state by speaking with them and making inferences from their observations. Freud created a concept of the unconscious and argued that these unconscious structures were exceptionally important in defining individual action. B.F. Skinner, on the other hand, argued that the mind was not at all the proper focus of study for psychology. Rather, Skinner argued that psychology should focus only on the observable behavior of organisms in ways that were quantifiable and measurable. Skinner's goal was to discover the basic ways that human behavior could be controlled and to use that capability to make human civilization run better and more efficiently.

Sigmund Freud's approach to psychology, known traditionally as psychoanalysis, was a radically new way of viewing how human beings are constructed from a mental perspective. Perhaps the most important contribution that Freud added to the field of psychological inquiry was the notion of what he called the unconscious. The unconscious is that part of the mind that remains unknown and unknowable to the conscious mind in its construction of the world. He accounts for this development in his work, arguing that society required the repression of our most basic impulses, and that it is these repressed impulses that form the basis of the unconscious.

Freud and the Psychoanalytic Framework

As Felluga explains, what happens is that those "primitive impulses," of which the sexual impulse is the strongest, are sublimated or "diverted" towards other goals that are "socially higher and no longer sexual." Our instincts and primitive impulses are thus repressed; however, Freud believed that the sexual impulse was so powerful that it continually threatened to "return" and disrupt our conscious functioning — hence the now-famous term "the return of the repressed" (Felluga).

Freud noted not only that we are motivated by forces existing outside of our conscious understanding, but also developed a theoretical explanation for how and why these unconscious elements existed. He argued that the primary drive for human interaction was, at its base, sexual, and that the majority of repressed and unconscious motivations were different sublimations of a primal sexual impulse that society had necessarily required to be repressed.

In further developing his systems of the unconscious, Freud named the primary mechanisms that shape and affect the development and interaction of the unconscious. The most important of these forces are known as the "ego" and the "id." As Felluga explains, the id can be defined as follows:

The Id, the Ego, and the Oedipal Complex

"The id is the great reservoir of the libido, from which the ego seeks to distinguish itself through various mechanisms of repression. Because of that repression, the id seeks alternative expression for those impulses that we consider evil or excessively sexual, impulses that we often felt as perfectly natural at an earlier or archaic stage and have since repressed. The id is governed by the pleasure-principle and is oriented towards one's internal instincts and passions. Freud also argues on occasion that the id represents the inheritance of the species, which is passed on to us at birth; and yet for Freud the id is, at the same time, 'the dark, inaccessible part of our personality.'" (Felluga)

The central conflict in Freud's conception of consciousness thus occurs between the id — the storehouse of primal desires — and the ego, which, reinforced by society, seeks to separate itself from those base impulses and in some way overcome or at least sublimate them. Freud developed several other theories in accordance with these ideas, perhaps the most famous of which is the Oedipal Complex, in which he argued that young males feel a basic primal sexual competition with their fathers for possession of their mother, but repress this feeling because of societal constraints. Freud claimed that mechanisms such as these were formative and deeply affected the individual not only throughout development but also in adulthood.

While Freud's contributions to theoretical understandings of psychology — particularly his development of the concept of the unconscious — were absolutely essential to the psychological developments that followed, his work nonetheless contains several serious difficulties and much of it is no longer held in critical favor. Freud often tended to develop his ideas about the structures underlying human psychology without any real scientific basis, and from there he frequently used these already-assumed psychological functions to generate further insights, suggesting that much of his work was built on a shaky structure of assumption rather than observation and induction.