Topic > Psychology: Sigmund Freud and the Field of Psychology

The field of psychology is a very broad field. In that field of study, there are many different ways of looking at things, and among those views, or approaches, there is the behavioral approach and the psychoanalytic, or psychodynamic, approach. As you would expect, each approach focuses and interprets psychology differently. Behaviorists tend to focus more on changes in behavior in relation to a person's environment, while people from the psychoanalytic field tend to focus more on seeing human functioning as based on the interaction of drives and forces “within the person, in particular unconscious, and between different personality structures” (McLeod, 2007). As you can see, these two branches of psychology focus on different parts. Freud was one of the most influential people of the twentieth century, and his lasting legacy has influenced not only psychology, but art, literature, and even how people raise their children (McLeod, 2013). But being a well-known psychologist is not easy. Freud built his reputation by founding the psychodynamic approach. Josef Breuer, one of the psychologists with whom Freud works, was treating a patient: Anna O. Breuer managed to cure Anna by helping her recall forgotten memories of traumatic events. When Breuer and Freud talked about Anna O., Freud had an idea that he would pursue for the rest of his life: the different levels of the mind (“Sigmund Freud on Anna,” n.d.). In the book Studies on Hysteria, Breuer and Freud state and explain their theory on hysteria: "All hysteria is the result of a traumatic experience, which cannot be integrated into the person's understanding of the world" ("Studies on Hysteria" 'hysteria, "2013). In this case, Freud first introduced the idea that “physical symptoms are often the superficial manifestations of deeply repressed conflicts.” After publishing this, Sigmund Freud was called the “father of psychodynamics”. Freud founded the psychodynamic view of psychology, and for this reason he is such a famous person in the world because not only psychologists know who he is and what he does. Interestingly, it focuses on how people react to a certain environment. After learning and testing Thorndike's Law of Effect (yes, I tested the Law of Effect on my dog), it was fascinating to watch the experiment unfold, regardless of the results. One experiment that could be done for this field of study is to test how humans respond after receiving a promotion. For the experiment, the promotion will consist of a fifty thousand dollar raise and an extra week of vacation and he will be asked to fill out a survey in which he ranks people based on his aesthetics. The hypothesis is that after receiving the aforementioned promotion the subjects will be more willing to give a higher score to all the people participating in the survey. The control group will not receive the promotion but will still be asked to complete the survey, while the experimental group will receive the promotion followed by being asked to complete the survey