Tag Archives: modern psychology

Psychoanalysis/Psychodynamic

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Sarah Frankel

Psychology 100 003

Blog Assignment #1

5 February 2014

Psychodynamic studying means focusing on the unconscious and early development of people. This is the modern term for psychoanalysis, which takes a look into the early mind. It is the belief that childhood experiences greatly influence the development of later personality. Psychoanalysis emphasizes unconscious conflict and past events and early childhood trauma.

Every since I was young, loud noises such as music at a concert, fire drills, and thunderstorms had always bothered me. I would start to scream and cry whenever I heard any of those noises. No one else growing up with me had these issues and I would get made fun of for this. I feared the days in school when we had routine fire drills and even when there was a small chance for a thunderstorm I would refuse to go outside. This had a huge impact on my life and did not really go away until I got older. I remember my first ever concert. I was four years old and I had no idea what to expect from it. The second the concert started I started to freak out and cry. My dad had to take me outside of the venue and we ended up missing the entire show. That’s what started it all. I did not like being surprised by loud noises. At school I would want to be warned before a fire drill and when there was a thunderstorm, I go into the basement of my home to try and prevent myself from hearing it.

Growing up, this fear I had became a part of me and affected my personality. One moment I could be totally fine, the next I would be panicking. It really affected the people around me too. They would have to constantly worry if I was okay or not. My parents even made me go to therapy to try and get rid of my fear but it did not work out. As I got older I was able to actually grow out of most of these fears. I matured as I got older and realized that there wasn’t anything to be afraid of. Thunderstorms still scare me but not to the extent to which it did when I was younger. When I know a storm is coming, a little piece of me still gets anxious. This is from all of the fear that I had when I was younger and how some of it still stuck with me.

This psychology theory applies to the fears and traumatic events I’ve had when I was little and how even today it is still a part of my life. Maybe as I get older the fear will completely disappear, but I do believe that some of it will still stay with me because that is how my mind perceives it. I was affected by my fears so early on in my life that it is imbedded into my thought processes.

 

Sociocultural Perspective

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When looking at modern perspectives of psychology, one of my favorite ones to study is the idea of sociocultural, or how others influence you and you influence others. While it is somewhat of an obvious perspective, I find it to have such a strong influence on people. Even though I also believe that the other six modern perspectives are all important, I find myself relying on this one most often. Many times after meeting new people or learning things about old friends, I will find myself justifying their actions based off of what I have learned about their social factors and culture. I feel that learning about one’s social factors in their life can help tell you a great deal about their behaviors and why people act the way they do.

One sociocultural factor that I truly believe had an impact on me was my mother and her hatred for all seafood. For the last twenty one years of my life, my mom cooked dinner almost every night and had never made a seafood dinner. She hates to eat any sort of fish, cannot stand the smell, and so she also hates to cook it and actually refuses to. Since I have grown up never trying seafood and never having to smell it’s fishy aroma, I also have adopted this attitude. I cannot stand to smell the stench that seafood produces and any seafood that I have newly and recently tried I hate. To be completely honest though, I think a majority of this notion is in my head as it was what I was raised hearing and what became a part of my culture. Some seafood does not have the fishy taste and I still claim I do not like it but often I wonder to myself if that is actually true or if it is just too unfamiliar for me to say I like it? Fish was never a food served at dinner or social gatherings in my culture, so therefore I have learned to never eat fish for dinner or at social gatherings. I do think everyones social factors and cultures have such a strong impact on their lives and decisions, and now I have evidence to blame my mother for being the sociocultural reason that I will not touch seafood either.