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(Answer to Q. 1) Answer: One of the most successful and applicable lines of psychological research is that of attachment theory. It was started by John Bowlby after WWII and continued experimentally by Mary Ainsworth and others, and it continues to be an active research area today. At the heart of attachment theory is the concept that human beings have evolved a set of behavior patterns for children and adults that have the survival advantage of keeping infants and caregivers in close contact. Infants are designed by evolution to expect a caregiver that will protect them and with the experience of close contact they come to trust their mother, feel relaxed in their presence and anxious in their absence and build a set of internal working models based on their early experiences of caregiving. Infants, who have the experience of a mother or caregiver who spends time with them and meets their basic needs for food, shelter, and contact, come to develop a secure attachment with their caregiver. Infants are genetically programmed to feel relaxed in the presence of their caregiver, but anxious and fearful in their absence.
A hospital situation that forces the separation of an infant or child from its caregiver therefore produces anxiety in the infant and the caregiver. Today, many hospitals have taken the research findings into consideration and either drastically reduce the rate of hospitalization of young children, as in the case of St. Judes, or make arrangements for families to spend a good deal of time, even sleeping overnight, with hospitalized children in order to maintain and foster secure attachment.
(Answer to Q. 2) Answer: There are a number of methodological and theoretical problems inherent in Freuds work . Methodologically, Freud relied solely on case studies of a few patients and himself. All of his patients had serious psychological problems and he helped them remember childhood experiences that he then related to his theory. The potential for him to bias what patients remembered and how those memories were interpreted is obvious. Modern research committees would not approve this methodology as it involves biased sampling and biased methods. Much of Freuds theory is based on an assumption that the Oedipal complex starts from childrens (age 2-5) awareness of genital differences between sexes and feelings of inferiority that derive from that knowledge. When you ask 2-5 year olds about genitals, their awareness of differences between the sexes is vague and presents no evidence of feelings of superiority or inferiority even when they are aware of the differences. Research in morality suggests that boys and girls do not differ in their reasoning about morality. Freud theorized that girls would have a lack of superego development and that, in general, both sexes are able to reason morally much earlier than Freud believed possible.
One contemporary theorist, Jeffrey Mason, has presented evidence that at least some of Freuds patients were not fantasizing about early childhood sexual experiences, as Freud came to believe, but were actually remembering real experiences of childhood sexual abuse. There is the possibility that Freuds whole theory of child development is not one of average or normal development, but a model of the development of children who have been sexually abused.
(Answer to Q. 3) Answer: For Freud the central driving force in child development was the sexual instinct, and he called his model psychosexual development. As a child ages and develops, his or her psychic energy or libidinal urge changes focus, but each presents the child with a challenge in the tension between the drive for immediate sexual gratification and the demands of the world around them which are often at odds with this instinct. The infant or child feels tension in an erogenous zone that is different for different ages. Initially the focus is the mouth (oral phase), then the anus (anal phase), and eventually genitals (genital phase). In each phase, if a balance is achieved between id impulses and superego inhibition by the ego that allows for a level of gratification of the id impulse, then progress to the next stage is possible. If, however, there is either too much gratification or too little gratification at a given stage then the result is fixation where psychic energy is still devoted to that phase and progress to the next stage is impossible. This fixation at an unresolved stage will color the individuals adult personality and behavior patterns through symbolic behavior.
(Answer to Q. 4) Answer: The student has quite a few choices here. The defense mechanisms discussed in the textbook include reaction formation, isolation, denial, undoing, projection, displacement, sublimation, repression, and rationalization. I have seen lists of 30-40 so I see no need to confine the student to those discussed in the book. The essential relationship is that defense mechanisms are designed to reduce anxiety, which is caused by the tension between attempts on the part of the ego to balance the demands of id and superego. Then the student just needs to explain how a given defense mechanism reduces this type of anxiety.
(Answer to Q. 5) Answer: d: primary process
(Answer to Q. 6) Answer: latent
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