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Essay on Psychodynamic Approaches to Human Development
Some of the different theories that have been proposed to explain how development takes place, and, perhaps most interesting, how we might apply these theories to our everyday lives. If you made a list of all the things you did and all the things you thought about in the course of one day, it would probably end up including thousands of items. Such a list of thoughts and events, recorded over a period of days or months, could be called a description of your developmental repertoire—a sort of picture of what you are like as a person.
On a grand scale, your behavioral repertoire represents the developmental process; it helps to explain how you got from point A to point B and what happened along the way. Throughout this book, you will find questions about this process. What different accounts have theorists proposed to help us understand how this developmental process happens? Why might people’s behavior in adulthood be so different from their behavior when they were infants? Does individuals’ behavior change from the time they are newborn infants to when they are preschoolers, middle school–age children, teenagers, and on into adulthood because of biological programming or because of environmental factors, such as the influence of parents and peers? Are the changes that we experience abrupt in nature or smooth and predictable? Do people change because of the amounts and kinds of stimulation they receive in their schooling? Are you what your environment made you, or is your behavior an expression of your biological inheritance?
The psychodynamic (or psychoanalytic) model, developed initially by Sigmund Freud, presents a view of development that is revolutionary in both its content and its implications for the nature of development. The basic assumption of this model is that development consists of dynamic, structural, and sequential components, each of which is influenced by a continuously renewed need for the gratification of basic instincts.....
