Alright, so structuralism and functionalism were really more concerned with psychological research, but someone was about to come and shake everything up, so enter Sigmund Freud. Now, Sigmund Freud was a neurologist working in Austria, and he worked with patients who had been diagnosed with hysteria as well as other nervous disorders. And this was basically like a blanket diagnosis for anybody who had unusual symptoms, but they could not find a clear medical diagnosis for them, so they would all get lumped together under this, like, hysteria diagnosis. And while he was working with his patients, he came to believe that his patients had mental conflicts or childhood trauma that was buried in their unconscious. And the unconscious is a really important idea here.

So the idea behind the unconscious is basically that it's a part of our mind that we cannot consciously access. So we are unaware of the things that are in our unconscious is the idea. And Freud believed that these mental conflicts and childhood trauma that we can be distressed by something that we're not even really consciously aware of, or even the idea that mental distress can cause pretty severe physical symptoms, it's not really new to us today. It's almost, like, obvious to us. But at the time, this was a very novel idea.

This had never really been like medically documented in the Western world. So Freud was like pioneering over here, you know, way back then. So he basically what he would do with his patients is he would just talk to them, and he realized that the more that they were able to just discuss what they were feeling and what they were thinking and talk through these conflicts or traumas, he noticed that they began to have symptom reduction and they were actually getting better. And based on that, Freud developed psychoanalysis, which is a therapy that is designed to give people access to their unconscious. So basically, we'll talk about this in more detail in future chapters, but long story short, you talk and talk and talk a ton to your therapist until you are able to access this unconscious, and that will kind of unlock all of these mental conflicts or traumas, and you can bring it to the surface and talk through it.

So that's kind of the idea behind psychoanalysis. Now, Freud did not only do therapy, he also did some theoretical work, And so over time throughout his career, Freud developed the psychoanalytic theory. And this is an approach to psychology that emphasizes the influence of the unconscious, so we're seeing a common theme here, on thoughts and behaviors. So how are these conflicts and emotions that you have buried in your unconscious influencing the emotions and thoughts and behaviors that you are consciously aware of? And Freud applied his theory to better understand things like personality, human development, as well as to inform his clinical practice.

Now, when we're thinking about psychoanalytic theory or the psychoanalytic perspective more generally as a school of thought, Some important founders to be aware of are, of course, Sigmund Freud himself as well as Carl Jung and Alfred Adler are some names that you might see come up in relation to this perspective. And the main question that they were asking was, you know, how do unconscious motives and early childhood experiences influence well-being and behavior? So anytime you see the unconscious, especially in relation to early childhood, that's almost always going to be a Freud or a psychoanalytic thing. And then the main methodology here being psychoanalysis to help people tap into that unconscious. Now there is a big limitation here, which is that many of Freud's theories lack empirical evidence.

So we will talk about this in more detail in some upcoming chapters but just to kind of give you a little bit of insight, a lot of Freud's theories are just untestable premises which is not great for a scientific theory. Scientific theories should be testable. Right? So that's kind of a problem, and then some of the ones that are testable, you know, have not stood up to modern-day scientific testing. He does have some ideas that have been scientifically validated over time, and his therapeutic practices have been modified over the last few decades and are still used today.

So, you know, for better or worse, Freud had a really huge influence on the field of psychology, not only in the domain of therapy but also in personality and development, and we're going to be talking about him at several points throughout this course. So we're kind of stuck with him. Alright. So that is our little intro into Freud and the psychoanalytic perspective, and I will see you guys in the next one. Bye bye.