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Sigmund Freud 's Theory Of Psychology Essay

Decent Essays

At the start psychology was not a science; it was ‘made up’. In pre-historic age it was believed any behaviour that swayed from ‘the norm’ was due to demonic spirits possessing the brain. Advances in treatments and medicine, allow us to recognise how barbarous this belief was. The progress of these advances was clear by the opening of the first experimental laboratory in 1879 by Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt’s establishment of psychology as an academic discipline exaggerated how obsolete the previous way of thinking was. His book defined the view that all mental experience can be understood as a combination of simple elements or events. These improvements have modernised into a simple definition – Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and behaviour. In psychology four different schools of thought have developed to explore multiple thought based on the mind and behaviour; Psychoanalytic, Behaviourist, Cognitive and Biological.
In 1896 Sigmund Freud (1865-1939) founded the psychoanalytic approach. Freud encountered patients suffering from a disease without apparent cause. He was the first to propose that psychological factors were responsible. Freud’s approach focuses on the unconscious mind with conflict. Freud published his psychoanalytic theory of personality in 1900, and also developed a form of psychotherapy called psychoanalysis (Gross, 2015, p2).
One key feature of Freud’s theory was the development of personality. The first stage of personality is the ‘ID’; this is

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