Psychology - Individual Differences Example

Psychology - Individual Differences Example Psychology - Individual Differences â€" Essay Example > PSYCHOLOGYINTRODUCTIONFrom Freud to the present, psychoanalytic theorists have tried to explain hypnosis. Reviews of these positions (Gruenwald, 2004; Silverstein Silverstein, 1990a, 1990b) have pointed out that in many cases theoretical developments were responses to paradigm shifts within psychoanalysis rather than to the accumulation of empirical evidence. For example, during the period of advances in ego psychology in the 1940s and 1950s, new theories of hypnosis incorporated ego psychological standpoints and remained relatively free of the drive-based explanations that had characterized earlier theories. Thus, important theoretical developments have taken place, but there has been little effort to assess the validity of any of the theories, although such efforts can have important implications. In this paper I will discuss the extent to which experimental evidence supports the unconscious causes of human behavior. DISCUSSIONIt is a natural, indeed pervasive; trait of the hum an mind to reason analogically (e. g. Oppenheimer, 1956) and the attempts of humans to describe how their minds operate (the mind describing the mind) is no exception. These analogical descriptions of the human mind have been influenced by scientific advances as well as by popular technologies. This is true even though science and technology themselves are products of the mind, creating the ludicrous phenomenon of the products of the mind's inventiveness serving as analogies of the way the mind functions. Chemistry made great advances in the late 18th and early 19th century, so it is not surprising that Thomas Brown (1824), whose lectures were collected and published after his death in 1820, used the terminology of chemistry in his description of how the mind operates. “What the chemist does, in matter, the intellectual analysis does in mind” (p. 129), he said and, further, “as, in chemistry, it often happens, that the qualities of the separate ingredients of a compound body are not recognizable by us … so, in the spontaneous chemistry of the mind, the compound sentiment … has … so little resemblance to these constituents of it … that it requires the most attentive reflection of it to separate … the assemblages which even a few years may have produced” (p. 124). The ‘chemistry of the mind’ was an approach that emphasized both the constituents of the mind â€" the building of associations into complex mental phenomena â€" and the manner of analyzing it. It was extremely influential in the further development of empiricism, but Brown recognized an imperfection in comparing the psychologist to the chemist. Although “it is the labor of the intellectual inquirer to analyze, as it is the labor of the chemist to reduce the compound bodies. … the process, and the instruments by which the analyses are carried on, are, indeed, as different as matter is from mind. … [Whereas] the aggregates of matter we analyze by the use of other matter … the complex mental phenomena we analyze virtually by mere reflection; the same individual mind being the subject of analysis, the instrument of analysis, and the analyzing (sic) inquirer” (pp. 120â€"121). (The italics in all three of the above quotations are in the original. )One could give other examples, but we can fast-forward to our own era and ask how many psychologists now take seriously the idea that the latest of the mind's achievements, the computer, can provide us with a model of how the mind works? It must be very many, so burdened are we with long flow charts and computer simulations of the mind's activities.