The 3 major schools of psychology

Psychoanalysis: Freud

Psychoanalysis was pioneered by Freud, and has been constantly revised and developed since then, with an influence that goes far beyond psychology, and so the readership is correspondingly wider.

To get a clear understanding of Freud's thinking, there are several other books that introduce his ideas. Charles Brenner's An Introduction to Psychoanalysis (Beijing Publishing House, 2000) summarizes Freud's basic ideas and the main content of psychoanalysis, with a clear and pertinent exposition that is extremely rare in books of its kind. Freud and Marx (Renmin University of China Press, 2004) describes the relationship between psychoanalysis and Marxism. Although the book was written in the 1930s, it has not lost its value.

Opinion: The school of psychoanalysis was gradually formed by Freud's countless summaries and years of accumulation of human pathological psychology during his lifelong practice of psychiatric medicine. It focuses mainly on psychoanalysis and therapy, and as a result proposes a new and unique interpretation of the human psyche and personality. The most important feature of Freud's psychoanalytic doctrine is that it emphasizes the instinctive, erotic, and natural side of human beings, and for the first time it elaborates on the role of the unconscious mind, affirms the role of irrational factors in behavior, and opens up a new field of subconscious research; it attaches importance to the study of personality, and to psychological applications.

Representatives of behaviorism: Watson, Skinner

Watson's creation of the behaviorist psychological theory system was popular in the 1920s, which profoundly affected the process of psychology. Behaviorism has evolved since then, with Skinner being the most influential.

Behaviorism is one of the major schools of modern psychology in the United States and one of the most influential on Western psychology. Behaviorism can be distinguished into old behaviorism and new behaviorism. The representatives of old behaviorism are led by Watson. The main representative of the new behaviorism is Skinner and so on.

Watson believes that human behavior is acquired, the environment determines a person's behavioral pattern, whether it is normal behavior or pathological behavior is acquired through learning, but also can be changed, increased or eliminated through learning, and that by identifying the regularity of the relationship between environmental stimuli and behavioral responses, it is possible to predict the response based on the stimulus or infer the stimulus based on the response to achieve the purpose of prediction and control of animal and human behavior. control of animal and human behavior. He believed that behavior is the organism to adapt to the environmental stimuli of a variety of physical response combination, some of the performance in the exterior, some hidden in the interior, in his eyes, there is no difference between humans and animals, all follow the same laws.

Skinner believed that psychology was concerned with the observable outward appearance of behavior, not the internal mechanisms of behavior. He believed that science must be studied within the context of the natural sciences, and that its task was to determine the functional relationship between an experimenter-controlled stimulus followed by an organism's response. Of course he took into account not only the relationship between a stimulus and a response, but also those conditions that change the relationship between the stimulus and the response, and his formula is: R = f (SoA)

Philosophical background: at the beginning of the twentieth century, the trend of mechanistic materialism that treats human beings as machines (including Descartes's mechanistic ideas about the mechanism of the human body, and La Omelite and other views that see human beings as machines) and the New Positivism, which uses empirical facts as a tool for checking off the subject-object boundary, all had a great influence on Watson.

Viewpoint: The main viewpoint of behaviorism is that psychology should not study consciousness, but only behavior, putting behavior in complete opposition to consciousness. In terms of research methods, behaviorism advocates the use of objective experimental methods instead of introspection.

Humanistic Representatives:Maslow, Rogers

Maslow's Self-Actualization Theory Maslow believed that the psychological drive of human behavior is not sexual instinct, but human needs, which he divided into two categories, seven levels, like a pyramid, from bottom to top, physiological needs, safety needs, the need for belonging and love, the need to respect, the need to know, the need for aesthetics, Self-actualization needs.

Rogers allows people to understand their own nature, no longer rely on external values, so that people can re-trust, relying on the body to evaluate the process to deal with the experience, eliminating the external environment through the internalization of the values imposed on him, so that people can freely express their own thoughts and feelings, by their own will to determine their own behavior, control their own destiny, to repair the potential for self-actualization has been destroyed, and to promote the healthy development of personality. The healthy development of personality.

Viewpoint: Humanism opposes the tendency to vulgarize and animalize the human psyche, the psychoanalytic school that takes only sick people as the object of study and sees people as instinctive victims, and the behaviorist school that sees people as physical and chemical objects. It favors the study of issues that are meaningful to human progress, and is concerned with the value and dignity of human beings.