Inner Biological Conflicts as Behavioral Determinants:

The Psychoanalytical Approach Sigmund Freud is perhaps

still one of the most widely known figures in psychology broadly
and in psychoanalysis specifically, despite the fact that
several of his theories have been discredited by the scientific
community and/or have been extensively modified. Nevertheless
some of his theories are still widely used in psychology such as
his theory of defense mechanisms, which include the ideas of
repression, displacement, denial, identification and projection.
Other concepts such as his concept of the unconscious and his
emphasis on passion and emotion also continue to have broad
appeal in the West. Moreover, Freud’s competitive drive theory
helped break the stranglehold that the rationalist and
individualistic program had over the preceding centuries.

Freud’s view of human nature was quite pessimistic. As a

result, his original hypothesis regarding the formation of
personality was that it formed through on-going competitive
biological drives (instincts) either of a sexual or aggressive
nature. These drives were considered to be the fundamental cause
of much behavior and they were further associated with a
person’s psychic energy or what Freud called the libido.
Neurosis or other similar behavioral abnormalities then were
largely attributed to these sexual or aggressive drives. To
illustrate where and how these conflicting drives arose Freud
(1962 [1923], 1990 [1933]) devised a categorical model of the
mind in the form of the id, ego and superego. The id was
presumed to house the drives while the ego and the superego
mediated and discharged them respectively.

The id was Freud’s central analytical feature because he

believed it housed the driving forces of behavior. The id was
also presumed to be entirely submerged in the unconscious. The
goal of the psychoanalyst was to bring these unconscious desires
to the level of consciousness where it could thereupon be
resolved inwardly. Of the several significant concepts Freud
developed, his emphasis and use of the unconscious was perhaps
the most important. It represented a simple storehouse for the
sexual and aggressive instincts that were not generally
accessible to conscious thought and action. In other words, the
unconscious consisted merely of drives with no cognitive
processes or any form of habitual behavior.

Moreover, because the unconscious was presumed to

completely rule behavior, Freud did not view consciousness and
free will as a possibility. Instead he had a largely passive
view of the mind. It was passive in the sense that unconscious
instincts ruled behavior without any conscious mediation and it
was passive in the sense that, as an interface between it and
the environment, it operated in only one direction from the mind
to the environment and not back again. In yet another sense
however, Freud’s view of the mind was active because the drives
or instincts served an internal and functional purpose — to
fulfill certain ends like reproduction and survival. Or to put
it another way, the mind was presumed to have inherent
biological active features that allowed an individual to act in
the world but did not allow the world to act upon it. Applying
Freud’s psychoanalytic approach to understand the behavior of
deception, unfulfilled or unmediated sexual or aggressive
unconscious impulses would be identified as the culprit. Other
factors, like conscious thought and action, learning theory and
environmental factors (ecology and society) were largely
excluded.

Freud’s pessimistic view of human behavior did not resonate

with many of his students and it did not take long for fissures
to develop within his program. Carl Jung, one of Freud’s
students, was among the first to break with Freud’s general
theory. Jung viewed human behavior in more complex terms.
Humans, according to Jung, have many instincts besides the
sexual and aggressive ones. Among some of the instincts that
Jung (1962 [1923]) identified were creativity, hunger, activity,
power and individuation (self-actualization). Like Freud
however, he contributed a lot of behavior to the unconscious,
which he segmented into the personal and collective (Jung, 1972
[1917]). The latter represented potentialities of behavior while
the former manifested those potentialities in the individual.

According to Jung, people have either one of two innate

unconscious dominant attitudes: extroversion or introversion.
They also have an innate unconscious tendency to perceive events
in one of four ways: sensation, thinking, feeling and intuition.
Whichever is dominantly expressed will become conscious while
the others will be repressed and remain in the unconscious. If
the individual’s innate predisposition is modified by the
environment in some way, such as when an introvert is made to
become an extravert, that person will likely develop a form of
neurosis in later years. This is also believed to be true when
an inferior perception or attitude is repressed too strongly.
The result in both cases is internal maladjustment where
regression to the unconscious (a creative kind) is the usual
course of remedy. Jung’s understanding of the unconscious was
more complex and nuanced than that of Freud’s but shared two
similarities, a passive mind in terms of interface and little
regard for the concept of habit. But it was his understanding of
human nature as both degenerate and enlightening where Jung more
broadly departed from Freud. He believed that the ultimate
objective for an individual is to achieve full individuation,
that is, the realization of one’s innate personality. It is
important to stress that Jung did not view a person’s dominant
attitude and perception as absolute, but existed on a continuum.
Deceptive behavior from a Jungian perspective would likely be
attributed to deficient or maladjusted individuation. Jung’s
theories, similarly to Freud, have since come under critique.
Perhaps the most damaging are his libido theory, his idea that
the psyche was autonomous and his emphasis on religious
experience.

Nevertheless, he did move the field of personality

development in new directions. First he argued that behavior is
goal oriented and not simply a product of childhood experience.
Second, he emphasized the importance of identity by elevating
individuation as the ultimate goal. Third, he identified
specific attitudes and perceptions, like extraversion and
introversion, that acted as determinants of behavior. And
fourth, he included social interaction, even if limited, as a
factor in the development of behavioral characteristics. Other
psychoanalysts that did not entirely dispense with the basic
premises of Freudian theory (neo-Freudians and object-relation
theorists) either expanded his theories by placing more emphasis
on the role of the ego or by emphasizing the relations between
the individual and the object over the sexual and aggressive
drives that propelled one towards those objects. Both camps more
readily adopted the idea that social factors and in particular
the relationship between child and parent played a larger role
in the development of personality. Giving credence to outside
influences also lent itself to the idea that behavior is, at
least in part, learned.

Nevertheless Freud’s view of the mind as a one directional

interface and his emphasis on neurotic inner conflicts remained
a primary determinant of behavior for psychoanalysts. It is also
significant to point out that in the case of deception, location
of blame would be primarily placed upon the individual and not
her circumstance as it was in the Medieval era.

Stimuli as Behavioral Determinants: Structuralism and

Behaviorist Approaches

Similar views of a passive mind as interface, albeit under

very different theoretical constructions, later appeared in the
first quarter of the twentieth century when Edward Titchener, a
student of Wilhelm Wundt, transplanted Wundt’s psychological
approach and experimental introspective methods to the United
States. Although Wundt, a German physiologist, physician, and
founding figure, had an approach that contrasted sharply with
the psychoanalytic school — his subject matter was squarely
about consciousness and not unconscious instincts — his partial
essentialist interpretation of the mind led him to a passive
understanding of it, at least in respect to how the mind
interacted with the environment.

Wundt (1897) had what appeared to be both a reductionist

and dynamic model of the mind. Applying Gustav Theodor Fechner’s
(1966 [1860]) psychophysical methods, he argued it was
impossible to test mental processes greater than basic elements
of perception like color, brightness or shape. Consequently, his
introspective experiments sought to capture only these and
nothing more.

However, once these elements were received in the mind,

Wundt proposed that they were reorganized into higher-orders and
that upon completion have entirely new properties. He called
this process of constructing wholes from parts apperception, a
process it might be suggested that closely mirrors the current
scientific understanding of emergence.

Titchener followed Wundt in that consciousness and its

elements remained the subject matter but rejected his concept of
apperception. Titchener’s objective, through introspective
methods, was to discover the fundamental particles of the mind
and thus reveal its internal structure. His general approach,
like many other social scientists before and after him, was
influenced by the theories and accomplishments that were
occurring in the natural sciences.

Titchener’s experimental and natural science approach was

taken to its logical extension when a new movement, behaviorism,
began to emerge circa 1925. This peculiarly American movement
was inspired and initiated by John B. Watson (1914, 1924) but
found its roots in Wundt’s experimental psychology, Titchener’s
structuralism as well as the animal studies done in the early
twentieth century including Ivan Pavlov’s work with dogs.

Watson, like Titchener, sought to attain scientific

objectivity. To accomplish this, he rejected the study of
consciousness and the introspective method. In its place he
adopted an experimental technique of stimulus and response that
reduced thought and action to implicit motor behavior.

He did not however completely dispense with the concept of

the unconscious. To bring this idea into alignment with his
reductionist view of the mind, he rejected the notion of
instincts and reclassified the unconscious as habitual behavior
whereupon he redefined the term habit as basic physiological
elements (Camie, 1986, p.1068).14 His redefinition of habit
effectively eliminated purposive action whether of an
unconscious or conscious type. All behavior according to Watson,
including the process of reflective thinking, was a product of
physiological processes that operate mechanically and respond to
stimuli. Watson (1919) even defined thinking as an operation of
the “tongue, throat, and laryngeal muscles...moving in habitual
trains” (p.11)

Burrhus F. Skinner (1938, 1953, 1976) refined and carried

Watson’s program into the 1970s. Skinner’s brand of behaviorism,
operant conditioning, posited that much of behavior is a product
of specific consequences and reinforcers leaving the individual
bereft of goal-oriented (future) action. He also rejected any
non-observable concept as a cause of behavior. This view of the
mind, similar to the psychoanalytical school, is passive but it
appears to be so to even a greater degree. Like Freud’s vision,
it is passive as an interface because it is unidirectional and
it is passive in that there is no conscious mediation but it is
also passive in that the internal mechanisms of the mind serve
no functional purpose other than to respond to stimuli.

Avoidance Coping, Avoidance coping plays an important role

in common psychological problems. Avoidance coping
creates stress and anxiety, and ravages self-confidence. It's is
a major factor that differentiates people who have common
psychological problems (e.g., depression, anxiety, and/or eating
disorders) vs. those you don’t. The first step to overcoming
avoidance coping is to learn to recognize it (at the time you're
doing