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Behavioral Development Theories of Freud and Skinner

Behavioral Development Theories of Freud and Skinner

Why do we behave the way we do? How much does our environment play a role in shaping our personalities? Do we really suppress unwanted memories? These are all questions that everyone often wonders about. There are many experts that share and dispute the answers to these questions, but there are two in particular that have contributed greatly in finding explanations.

Sigmund Freud’s ideas today are still strongly contested and cause plenty of controversy. Freud believes that people act out certain behaviors that originate from the unconscious mind. He took the unconscious to be an element of human life that was inaccessible and important as a source of thoughts and actions. He was committed to the concept that apparently meaningless behaviors actually expressed unconscious conflict. With that he developed techniques for determining what the behaviors might mean.

Freud determined that dreams, “slips of the tongue”, and jokes were signs of concealed, conflicting desires. Most of these desires are aggressive or sexual in nature. His conclusion was that our society does not accept this behavior, so it is discouraged and those unruly desires are repressed. Our repressed desires, according to psychoanalysis, only appear to us disguised as dreams, symptoms, and other seemingly incoherent, uncontrolled actions. Freud thought it to be necessary to speculate the existence of an unconscious that interacts with conscious life. Freud’s concept of repression is “desires are repressed (bringing distress) because satisfying them would bring even greater distress. But the repressed desires remain active within us, seeking some expression or gratification, even as they are denied.” So the unconscious finds some outlet in even the most familiar aspects of our lives. Strong desires will always find some way of expressing themselves.

The more Freud studied and supported his ideas, the more controversy arose. Most people did not want to accept that they had uncontrollable thoughts and desires. Many did not want to believe that we have an unconscious mind. How could the unconscious be measured? How could it be studied? How do we know these “repressed” memories are real? With those questions many experts wanted to persist with the things that could be measured, seen, and undoubtedly be correct.

One of those psychologists was B.F Skinner. Skinner...

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