PSYCHOLOGY MONTHLY Ricardo Mateos March 2015
PSYCHOLOGY MONTHLY All you need to know about Psychological Perspectives, with the clearest explanations and the cheapest price!
Stanley Milgram Comic
Excerpt from Freud’s Diary Today James Claster came by for one of his weekly psychotherapy sessions. I have been working for a long time with him and he seems to have a lot of problems due to repressed feelings and fears. Throughout my sessions I have talked with him and he has told me of his childhood and it appears that he is dealing with the effects of his hard childhood since he was abandoned at a very young age by his father and because of that he has commitment issues. In order to find more about my patient’s problem, I decided to ask him about his dreams because I believe that they are a way to access the subconscious and find about repressed desires, fears, and conflicts.
James Claster
Excerpt from Freud’s Diary My patient told me that he found himself in medieval England, as a peasant. He was strolling through the streets of London when members of the royal guard came by to apprehend him. He was taken to the castle where the King and Queen tried him for allegedly riding a horse that did not belong to him. While the Queen was in my patients favor, the King turned his back on him and decided to make him pay for his crime by having his teeth extracted and then live the rest of his life in the dungeon. As he was being thrown into the dungeon he started to fall for a very long time until he finally woke up. (manifest) This dream told me a lot about my patient. Here is my analysis of the latent content of the dream. The fact that he was apprehended by riding someone else’s horse means that he has engaged in adultery, since riding a horse symbolizes sexual intercourse. Also, the fact that the King turned his back on him means that his father (symbolized by the king) left him or abandoned him at a young age. The punishment of having his teeth extracted signifies his fear of being castrated, and the fact that he fell for such a long time before waking up tells me that my patient wants to return to a state in which he felt protected, probably the time before his father left him.
Learn to educate your kids with this “How to Guide”! If you have problems with your kids wetting the bed, you have just arrived to the correct place. In this segment I will show you how to apply the concepts of Behavioral Psychology and control your kids behavior. Here you will find a complete guide to how to make your child stop wetting the bed by using B.F. Skinner’s concept of Operant Conditioning. The first step is to identify what behavior you want to change, and if you want to decrease it or increase it. In this case the behavior you want to change is the fact that your child is wetting the bed, and you obviously want to decrease the behavior. The next step consists in deciding whether you want to add or remove stimulus in order to get the desired behavior. The diagram below shows what type of punishment/reinforcement must be used depending on whether you want to add or decrease stimulus.
How to Guide (Continued) • Taking into account that we want the child to decrease his behavior, according to the diagram we must use punishment. • You as parents may choose whether you want to add something or remove something in order to get the desired behavior. • As an example, we will assume that you want to remove something, thus you will be using NEGATIVE PUNISHMENT. • Since you will use negative punishment you have to choose what to remove. For example let’s assume that your child loves to drink hot chocolate every morning. • Everyday that your child wets the bed he won’t get to drink his hot chocolate, and when he doesn’t wet the bed he will be able to drink his usual drink. • Continue this until your child stops wetting the bed and does so without you interfering with his behavior.
Opinion Piece As one of the most important psychologists of recent times and having won a Nobel Prize, I am outraged of seeing how some psychological theories such as the biological and the cognitive approaches have gained popularity in recent years. I am a firm believer in the Humanist Psychological Approach. It is not right to treat humans as subjects who we can test and make assumptions about. Every single person in this world is different from each other and has gone through different experiences which have made them a unique person, who is unlike any of the other 7 billion people on earth. The Biological Approach says that we can study animals in order to understand humans better, like Jane Goodall and chimpanzees, but they are completely wrong since us humans are immensely different to all other animals, including chimps. Every mind is a universe of its own, because of this psychologists can’t generalize about human nature. Stanley Milgram and other cognitive psychologists say that the human mind can be treated like a computer, one in which can input certain data and obtain certain, expected results. This view is wrong, since every human is different from each other and no predictions can be made about their behavior. It is wrong and dehumanizing for us to treat members of our own race like animals and use them as subjects for tests. We can’t use the scientific approach to study humans since it is morally wrong and we will get different results each time due to the uniqueness of each person. I believe that we must study and treat person individually, we must ask about their past and learn about every person’s story. Only then will we able to relieve patients of their psychological problems.
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