PSYCHOANALYSIS
Psychoanalysis designates concomitantly three things:
1. A method of mind investigation. And especially of the unconscious mind;
2. A therapy of neurosis inspired from the above method;
3. A new stand alone discipline who is based on the knowledge acquired from applying the investigation method and clinical experiences.
Psychoanalysis is the Sigmund Freud' s creation.
- Freud lived most of his life in Vienna and died in London in 1939. He discovered psychoanalysis by systematizing ideas and information coming from different, theoretical and clinical directions.
- The self-analysis, to which Freud was submitted himself, represented the biggest contribution to the birth of psychoanalysis.
- Freud was a Jewish neuropathologist who tried to set up a psychoanalytical movement with the help of non Jewish specialist in order to make his orientation more reliable. In this context he collaborated with outstanding personalities, such as, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Sandor Ferenczi, and Wilhelm Reich.
- The psychoanalytical movement initiated by Freud went through a lot of ideological break offs and difficulties. Today it is inherited by a series of national or international societies that dispute their supremacy.
BEHAVIORISM
B. F. Skinner’s entire system is based on operant conditioning. The organism is in the process of “operating” on the environment, which in ordinary terms means it is bouncing around its world, doing what it does. During this “operating,” the organism encounters a special kind of stimulus, called a reinforcing stimulus, or simply a reinforcer. This special stimulus has the effect of increasing the operant -- that is, the behavior occurring just before the reinforcer. This is operant conditioning: “the behavior is followed by a consequence, and the nature of the consequence modifies the organisms tendency to repeat the behavior in the future.”
Imagine a rat in a cage. This is a special cage (called, in fact, a “Skinner box”) that has a bar or pedal on one wall that, when pressed, causes a little mechanism to release a food pellet into the cage. The rat is bouncing around the cage, doing whatever it is rats do, when he accidentally presses the bar and -- hey, presto! -- a food pellet falls into the cage! The operant is the behavior just prior to the reinforcer, which is the food pellet, of course. In no time at all, the rat is furiously peddling away at the bar, hoarding his pile of pellets in the corner of the cage.
A behavior followed by a reinforcing stimulus results in an increased probability of that behavior occurring in the future.
What if you don’t give the rat any more pellets? Apparently, he’s no fool, and after a few futile attempts, he stops his bar-pressing behavior. This is called extinction of the operant behavior.
A behavior no longer followed by the reinforcing stimulus results in a decreased probability of that behavior occurring in the future.
Now, if you were to turn the pellet machine back on, so that pressing the bar again provides the rat with pellets, the behavior of bar-pushing will “pop” right back into existence, much more quickly than it took for the rat to learn the behavior the first time. This is because the return of the reinforcer takes place in the context of a reinforcement history that goes all the way back to the very first time the rat was reinforced for pushing on the bar!
