Assignment Code: BPCC 106/ASST/TMA/2022-23

Course Code: BPCC-106

Assignment Name: DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL THOUGHT

Year: 2022-2023

Verification Status: Verified by Professor

Total Marks: 100

NOTE: All questions are compulsory.

PART A

Assignment One 2 x 20 = 40

Answer the following questions in about 500 words each. Each question carries 20 marks.

1. Describe the key concepts in Jungian psychoanalytical psychology.

Ans) Carl Jung was a psychiatrist in Zurich when he read Interpretation of Dreams. He thought the ideas were very interesting and started sending Freud copies of his work and writings. This was the start of a regular correspondence between the two men.

Structure of the Psyche

Jung's approach to personality was different from Freud's because he thought the most important thing was to make sense of and explain the construction of fantasies and dreams that show symbols and themes that go beyond an individual's personal experience. So, the three main parts of a person's personality were the conscious ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious.

The Conscious Ego

The ego is the part of a person that is aware of itself. It is made up of perceptions, memories, thoughts, and feelings. It is an important part of a person's sense of self, identity, and sense of continuity. It is similar to what Freud said about the ego.

The Personal Unconscious

It is similar to Freud's preconscious, but Jung added to it and talked about a few more parts. It is made up of information that isn't part of conscious awareness because you aren't paying attention or don't use it often enough, but that you can choose to become aware of. It may have memories of things that were once clear but have been forgotten, pushed down, ignored, or lost their power.

The Collective Unconscious

The level below the personal unconscious is the collective unconscious, also called the transpersonal unconscious. It is thought to be one of Jungian psychology's most important and controversial contributions. It is "independent of anything personal and shared by all men because its contents can be found everywhere."

Archetypes and Synchronicity

Archetypes can come out during times of stress, even if the person doesn't realise, they are stressed. Jung also thought that archetypes could exist outside of the laws of cause and effect. He said that some events are linked not by cause and effect but by what they mean. These kinds of things are called "meaningful coincidences," and the idea behind them is called "synchronicity."

Attitudes and Functions: Psychological Types

Jung made a distinction between two main ways of being, or orientations: extraversion and introversion. The extraverted attitude makes a person focus on the outside, objective world, while the introverted attitude makes a person focus on the inside, subjective world. Both of the attitudes exist in a person, but one of them usually takes over and is aware, while the other is unconscious. It's important to remember that the description is about how the person is oriented, not how social they are.

Principles of Equivalence and Entropy

Jung's view of psychodynamics is based on two main ideas: equivalence and entropy. The principle of equivalence, as it applies to psychic functioning, says that if a certain value weakens or gets worse, the sum of energy that value represents won't be completely lost in the person's psyche, but will come back in some other new value. So, energy can be changed, but it can't be lost. For example, if someone lost interest in a hobby, he or she would have found something else to do.

2. Discuss the main tenets of social constructionism.

Ans) Philosophers of science have said that observations are full of assumptions about how things work. No matter what observations are made, they are affected by what meanings have been given to things in the past. This idea, which has become a central part of modern science philosophy, is called "the theory-ladenness of observation." However, this idea is not unique to philosophy of science. The ecological approach to perception and Gestalt psychology are both based on the same idea. What people see in the world is based on what they think they know about it. The reason why theory ladenness happens is explained by gestalt psychology.

Gestaltists say that people see things as a whole, but that this whole view is based on previous theories. Philosophy of science and Gestaltian thought already had the idea of "theory-ladenness," or giving meaning based on previous theories. The idea was taken to a new level by the social constructionism approach. Social constructionism is based on the idea that a person's mind is not the only place where reality can be understood. Instead, people's observations and interpretations of events come up as they talk and talk with other people. This means that reality is not made by an individual, but by a group of people. Reality comes from how people interact with each other.

People have used the word "social constructionism" in many different ways. The term was first used in the title of a book called The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, which was written by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman and came out in 1966. Sociology, as the name of the book suggests, was the field in which it was used. Later, social psychologists started to use the term. At first, the term "social constructivism" was used in psychology to emphasise how a person's sense of self develops in a social setting. But by the 1980s, psychology was linked to the word "social constructionism."

Gergen had a wide range of ideas that came from different areas of philosophy, history, and literature. Gergen's goal was to bring about a point of view that supports generative knowledge creation, so that users can get the most out of this kind of knowledge. This was also how he saw psychotherapy. He says that the way language is used in therapy is not taken into account enough. He was just as interested in research into clinical events. Social scientists who are interested in things like beauty, gender, morality, pathology, race, science, and sexuality can use the idea of social constructionism. People used to think that these things happened because of fixed natural or metaphysical laws, so they didn't change over time. However, social constructionists have shown over and over again how much these ideas are actually culturally or historically specific. The ideas that are used to make these kinds of arguments come from a wide range of theoretical traditions, both inside and outside of the social sciences. Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber, three of the most important people who helped start the modern social sciences, have all made important contributions to social constructionism. They have set a lot of important examples for social constructionist science.

Assignment Two

6 x 5 = 30

Answer the following questions in about 100 words each. Each question carries 5 marks.

3. Freud’s method of research

Ans) Even though psychoanalysis was becoming more and more popular as a way to treat people, Freud wanted to figure out how people act. He saw himself more as a scientist than a therapist, and he used free association and dream analysis as ways to collect data for his studies. Freud was more interested in how these techniques could be used in science than in how they could be used in therapy. Freud's passion was his research, which he used to build a theory about how the human mind works. Freud's system was very different from the traditional experimental psychology of the time in both what it was about and how it worked. Even though Freud had a background in science, he did not use experimental research methods.

4. Feminist psychology

Ans) The movement in psychology that tries to use psychology to help women get ahead in life. Feminist psychology tries to use the power of psychology to improve the status of women. It does this by having important conversations about how best to study gender and how best to do psychology. Feminist psychologists think that if they want to use psychology to make changes in the larger world, they must also make changes in psychology. This thought is based on the idea that traditional psychology still reflects societal gender bias, even if it does so in subtle and implicit ways. Feminist psychology is clearly political, and the feminist movement has helped it grow.

5. Nativism vs Empiricism

Ans) The idea of nature can be traced back to nativism, a philosophical theory that says people's abilities and skills are determined by their genes instead of what they learn and do. Empiricism, on the other hand, is a philosophy that focuses on learning and experience. The idea of nurture can be traced back to empiricism, which was popular among British philosophers in the 17th century, especially John Locke. Nativism and empiricism are seen as two completely different ways of thinking about how people learn and develop skills. Psychologists today, on the other hand, rarely take such extreme positions and find them to be overly simple. They think that genes and the environment work together more.

6. Criticism of Functionalism

Ans) One of the main things that people didn't like about functionalism was that the word "functionalism" wasn't very well defined. Ruckmick, a student of Titchener's, looked at how the word "function" was used in 15 introductory psychology books. He found that function is mostly used to do two things: a) act as an activity or process, and b) help other processes or the whole organism. In the first case, "function" is the same thing as "activity." For instance, the actions of remembering or noticing were also called functions. In the second case, the word "function" is used to show how useful an action is to an organism. For example, digesting food is an action (of the digestive system). Based on these facts, Ruckmick criticised functionalists for not being clear about what the term meant and for using it in different ways.

7. The Elements of Consciousness (Titchener)

Ans) Even though Wundt was interested in the parts of conscious experience, he did see that perceptions in the real world have a common thread. For example, a tree is seen as a whole, not as a series of separate sensations or conscious experiences of colour, shape, or brightness, which is what trained observers in a lab tend to say when they look inward. Wundt's doctrine of apperception explains how the simple parts of a conscious experience can be put together to make a whole. Creative synthesis is the process of putting mental parts together to make a whole. It is also called the law of psychic resultants because it creates new properties from the combination of the parts. Wundt says that every psychic compound has properties that can't be explained by adding up the properties of its elements. The Gestalt psychologists also pushed for this idea.

8. Contribution of Ebbinghaus

Ans) A lot of Ebbinghaus's work was about how people remember things. He often used himself as a test subject to see how well his new ideas worked. He made more than 2,000 three-letter words that made no sense. He used these to find out how people made connections in their minds. He was one of the first psychologists. He put his ideas to the test using the scientific method and wrote down everything he saw and learned. From his experiments, he saw patterns in how people remember things. He looked at how we remember and forget things and found patterns. The spacing effect and the serial position effect are two of his most well-known ideas. He came up with these ideas after many hours of lab research based on what he saw.

PART B

Tutorial

2 x 15 = 30

Note: You need to complete the activities according to the given instructions. Please attempt the activities in a coherent and organized manner. The word limit for each activity is around 700 words. Each activity is of 15 marks. For the activities, you need to refer to the self-learning material, and any other relevant offline or online resources. Some useful resources are also listed at the end of each unit.

1. Read the article on Social Constructionism (link below) and summarize the main ideas in your own words. Social_Constructionist_Movement.pdf (swarthmore.edu)

Ans) This article tries to bring into focus the main parts of a challenging movement that is happening now. It would be wrong to say that the movement is new or that there are a lot of people who support it. The movement can be traced back to earlier times, and it might be better to call it a shared consciousness instead of a movement. But in its current state of change, this new body of thought has implications that are very important. Not only are there new areas of study to look into, but the foundations of psychological knowledge are also brought into sharp focus. When all of the implications are thought through, it becomes clear that the study of social process could become a general way to figure out what knowledge is. In this case, social psychology would not be a branch of general psychology. Instead, the latter would be seen as a type of social process whose causes and results can be explained by social inquiry. In a similar way, social inquiry could replace or take over epistemological inquiry and the philosophy of science.

Social constructionism has grown in places where people are unhappy. It starts with a lot of doubt about things that people take for granted, whether in the sciences or in everyday life. In a specific way, it can be seen as a form of social criticism. Constructionism asks you to stop believing that commonly accepted categories or ways of thinking are true because of what you see. So, it makes you question the objective basis of what you already know. For example, Kessler and McKenna's (1978) study of the social construction of gender tries to break down the fact that there are two genders, which seems like it can't be changed. By looking at how different cultures and subcultures view gender in different ways, the meanings of the words man and wornan become less clear. There are now more ways to think about the differences between men and women, or even to stop thinking about them at all.

When you look at history as a whole, you can see how important the constructionist movement was. Even though this article doesn't have enough space to cover all of the relevant history, it is helpful to look at constructionism in light of two major and competing intellectual traditions. Most of the differences between these traditions can be found in their basic approaches to or models of knowledge. On the one hand, thinkers like Locke, Hume, the Mills, and various logical empiricists in the 21st century have linked knowledge (as a mental representation) to events in the real world. Knowledge copies (or, ideally, should copy) the shape of the world. As psychology grew in the United States, it became strongly influenced by ideas from both pragmatism and positivism. This gave it a strong "exogenous" feel. Behaviorism and neo behaviorism put (and continue to put) the most important things that affect how people act in the environment. People say that if an organism is to adapt successfully, it needs to know enough about its environment to accurately represent it.

Even though many people will find it hard to stop using psychological mechanisms, structures, and processes as main ways to explain things, this loss may come with a big challenge. The main challenge is coming up with a new way of thinking about knowledge. To get the point, you need to realise that both the endogenous and exogenous orientations have problems that are deeply rooted in how we think about scientific knowledge and how we get it today. In particular, the exogenic intellectual tradition is where most of the empiricist assumptions that form the basis for research in psychology (and almost all of modern science) come from. This way of thinking, which puts a lot of emphasis on knowledge as an internal representation of the way things are in nature, is very clear in the way science has traditionally tried to establish knowledge through processes of verifying and disproving empirical claims. But if constructionism wants to get past the exogenous-endogenous dichotomy and the endless fights it has caused so far, it must also give up the empiricist view of how science works. As it abandons the subject-object dichotomy that is central to disciplinary debate, it must also challenge dualism as the basis for a theory of scientific knowledge. The Western idea of objective, individualistic, historical knowledge has crept into almost every part of institutional life in the modern world.

2. Discuss the psychological thought in some major Eastern Systems like Bhagavad-Gita, Buddhism, Sufism, etc.

Ans) In Sanskrit literature and culture, things that have to do with psychology are very important. Even texts about drama, the oldest of which is from the 4th century BCE, have ideas about core feelings and emotions and the mental perceptions that change them. These texts are not religious, and art, science, and religion are kept separate. This is what the West has come to think of as modernity. Sanskrit literature and its philosophical traditions about the mind have had an effect on almost every major branch of modern psychology, even though they don't get much credit for it. This has been going on for a few hundred years.

Bhagavad Gita is what Lord Krishna and Arjuna said to each other. When the warrior Arjuna wants to know what to do, Krishna gives him advice. The Bhagavad Gita says that people have problems because they don't have a full integration of their lives. The Bhagavad Gita talks about the idea of consciousness, which is one of psychology's most important topics. It has to do with the ideas that Sigmund Freud talked about. The Bhagavad Gita's storey and characters make it clear how the id, ego, and superego work. The Bhagavad Gita says that you need to know about experiences and be smart to understand consciousness. It also talks about what it means to be enlightened. It also says that people have learned to interact with their surroundings by using one intellect (Buddhi). It is a person's intellectual ability that helps them act in the right way for the situation.

The Bhagavad Gita is part of the great epic Mahabharata, which is a well-known mythological storey in Hinduism. It is part of Bhishma Parva and is almost entirely a conversation between Lord Krishna (who is thought to be an incarnation of Vishnu) and Arjuna (the Pandava prince, Nara) on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, where the cousins Pandavas and Kauravas were fighting for control of the kingdom of Has It has 18 yogas (chapters) with about 701 slokas (short poems). The first one is called "Arjuna Vishada Yoga" (Sorrow of Arjuna), and the last one is called "Moksha Sanyasa Yoga" (Nirvana and Renunciation).

I would encourage the reader to understand the Bhagavad Gita in whatever way and with whatever wisdom he or she wants, depending on their beliefs and cultural-religious background. A work of fiction, a piece of history from 4000-5000 B.C., or a part of mythology that Sage VedaVyasa told Lord Ganesha to write down. What is more important and relevant is NOT WHAT IT IS, but WHAT HAPPENED in those 18 chapters of the Bhagavad Gita; the process and content of the dialogue; its usefulness as a model for counselling and its possible relevance to modern psychological therapies, especially, but not only in the Indian context.

Buddhism is a religion that focuses on the mind and looks at how people feel, think, act, and decide to do things. It also talks about ways to help people with mental health problems. In therapy, the goals of Buddhist psychology are: The householder must live a healthy, good life. Nirvana is the goal of life, which means the end of all suffering and dissatisfaction. Erich Fromm is a psychotherapist who talks about how Buddhists become enlightened. One of the Buddhist writings, Sutta peetika, which is a part of the Tripitaka, is about psychology. Buddhism also talks about how people see and understand the world. Buddhism also talks about psychological cravings, manas (pride), and ditthi (dogmas). Freud's theory of drives is similar to Buddhism's three basic drives: kama tanha (craving for pleasure), bava tanha (craving for existence), and bhava tanha (craving for death). Buddhism explains consciousness, self-growth, and how we understand things. It also talks about mental health.

Sufism is made up of ideas about the mind. Nafs, which means self, ego, or psyche, qalb, which means heart, and ruh, which means spirit, are the three main ideas. The self or ego is called Nafs. Sufism says that at the lowest level, nafs is the negative part of a person and is linked to negative tendencies that are driven by emotions and desires. Sufi psychology describes seven different kinds of self. The tyrannical self, the regretful self, the inspired self, the serene self, the pleased self, the pleasing self, and the pure self are the seven selves. Qalb is where the spirit lives. It includes more knowledge and intelligence. Sufi psychology says that qalb is the link between nafs and spirit. Qalb is in charge of the self. Ruh has something to do with gods. It includes the soul, mind, and body as a whole. Ruh is a concept in ego psychology, cognitive psychology, behavioural psychology, and transpersonal psychology.

Reference

a)     https://www.psychologistmanjuantil.com/2022/08/psychological-thought-in-some-major.html

b)     https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3361835/

c)     https://shrifreedom.org/ayurveda-2/history-of-east-west-psychology/

Note: Please mention reference details of the articles/books, at the end of your write-up.