A proponent of the psychoanalytic school of thought would not consider environmental stimuli to be important. Psychoanalytic theory argues that people’s personalities are results of unconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories. It views the “id” as the human mind’s driver of animalistic behavior like sexuality, the “superego” as the driver of...
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morality, and the "ego" as a sort of mediator between the other two. This theory confronts abnormal human behavior by attempting to bring up repressed emotions and unconscious desires. Because the theory’s focus is on the inner, unconscious workings of the human mind, it does not concern itself with environmental factors.
In contrast, a behaviorist would view environmental stimuli as extremely important, but not think much of psychoanalytic theory’s views on the “id.” To proponents of the psychoanalytic school of thought, the “id” is extremely important when studying human behavior because it encapsulates humans’ unconscious, instinctive desires. But the behaviorist does not look to the unconscious impulses human mind for answers about behavior. They instead look at the external environment for information on how it shapes how humans act. So the behaviorist would examine environmental stimuli as a cause of abnormal behavior while not paying mind to potential unconscious desires of the id, while a proponent of psychoanalysis would do the opposite.
How might a proponent of the psychoanalytic school of thought rate the importance of the influence of environmental stimuli, and how might a behaviorist view the concept of the id?
Psychoanalysis focuses on people's unconscious minds and how they influence human behavior. Led by Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalytic school identifies the roles of the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is all about desires and urges, while the ego deals with the outside world, and the superego is the home of values and ideals and culture. We can see from this description, then, that psychoanalysts would not pay much attention to environmental stimuli. Human motivations, psychoanalysts argue, are internal rather than external, and people are mostly driven by their internal desires rather than external forces.
The behaviorist school of thought, on the other hand, focuses primarily on external forces like environmental stimuli. Behaviorists argue that human behavior arises as a response to environment, not as a response to an internal force like the id. In fact, behaviorists would largely disregard psychoanalytic concepts of the id, ego, and superego as unhelpful at best and possibly even harmful in understanding and changing human behavior.