Understanding Human Behavior: Psychology and the Mind
Psychology: Understanding Human Behavior
Psychology is a discipline that specializes in human behavior, encompassing both its internal and external aspects.
Behavior and the Mind
Behavior is the reaction of an individual. It has a dimension of reality that is internal and unobservable (psychological life), and an external and observable dimension (behavior).
The mind is an entity that provides continuity and identity to us as people. It encompasses all the phenomena, mental processes, and states that we experience.
Key Properties of the Mind
- Intentionality: This is a property wherein our beliefs, memories, and desires refer to or tend toward something distinct from themselves. This feature differentiates mental states from other states and enables us to gain knowledge of reality, allowing us to represent it to ourselves.
- Privacy: Mental phenomena are directly accessible only to the subject experiencing them, but inaccessible to others.
- Consciousness and Unconsciousness: Consciousness is the awareness of what is happening to you. It is always self-awareness, an awareness of ourselves as beings who think, remember, or desire.
Awareness and privacy are specific and characteristic of humans. If the mind and consciousness are part of the human race, then all humans must have a psyche and be aware. The subject would be a privileged observer of their own feelings and thoughts.
Freud and Psychoanalysis
Freud challenged the idea that we have privileged knowledge of ourselves. He questioned whether we have a complete understanding of our psychological life.
Freud developed the theory of psychoanalysis, which is both a method for treating mental disorders and a theory about the human mind. He emphasized the existence of unconscious mental states and asserted their importance in human behavior.
Key Concepts in Psychoanalysis
- The primary impulses, which are unconscious, are the real drivers of behavior.
- Repression is the psychological mechanism that ensures that mentally dangerous contents remain in the unconscious.
- Sublimation is the channeling of an unacceptable unconscious desire into a culturally accepted and valued activity.
Cognitive Skills
Cognitive skills are those related to the process of knowledge and training. They help us understand reality and how it works.
- Perception: Organizes and interprets sensory data, configuring a coherent and unitary image of the perceived external object.
- Memory: Allows us to retain past experiences and recall them in the future. Forgetting is the inability to retrieve information stored in memory. Memory can be immediate, short-term, long-term, mechanical, or significant.
- Imagination: The ability to reproduce images, modify them, and create new ones with greater freedom and spontaneity. It can be reproductive or creative.
- Intelligence: The ability to solve problems. Emotional intelligence is the human capacity to feel, understand, control, and modify emotional states in oneself and others.
Affective States
Our surroundings always affect us in one way or another. There are three types of affectivity:
- Feelings
- Emotions
- Passions
Freud: The Father of Psychoanalysis
Freud was the father and founder of psychoanalysis. His theories had a significant impact on the field of psychology and on the concept that humans have of culture and of themselves.