Discussion of psychological theories

Discussion of psychological theories

Freud’s theory explains human behavior basing his argument on the unconscious motivations. He claims that human behavior is influenced by childhood experiences that have been buried in the unconscious part of the mind and manifests themselves in the adult ages through fear and anxiety actions (Holt, R. R. (1989). Milgram’s experiment on the other hand seeks to explain the conflicts that exists between obedience and authority.  According to Gibson, S., & Millard, K. (2018), the main aim of this experiment was to explain how people can cross even moral boundaries so that they obey and do as they are told by the authority figures.

Palliative measure are the techniques that we use so that we escape our life miseries and attain satisfaction in a more easy way. Some of this techniques includes;

• Deflections- this is the act of re-directing our needs and desires into ways that that they can be easily achieve and make us feel satisfied. It the less demanding path, and less resistant too.
• Substitutive satisfaction- where by people satisfy their desires by compensating the initial demand using another desire to satisfy it. As long as it helps us escape being unhappy even if it’s not what we initially desired to have.
• Intoxication- a strategy where people escape displeasure by shutting down the cravings of their desires, trying to forget their desires by indulging in other thing like art, drugs and religion among others.

Civilization on the other hand is the technique of where people choose to renounce their powerful individual displeasures because the displeasures occurrence is very unpredictable and they prefer to go for a pleasure that is more constant but is less intense and it brings a universal benefit. Civilization is said to be a source of suffering because of the following arguments;

• It’s a paradox in that instead of protecting humans from their life miseries and suffering it contributes to it partially. This is so because it puts a line of defense by protecting humans from nature, it puts into place rules to regulate human relations among each other and it gives priority to useless things like beauty and art
• In civilization the power of an individual is sacrificed to a power of a group and denies the individual to act on its own terms and put into account his responsibilities.
• Civilization has conditions that demands an individual to renounce his instincts and this something that can haunt an individual in the future especially if the pleasure that made him to sacrifice his instincts doesn’t maintain its consistency.

Looking on the things that contributes to displeasure and makes individual to  experience unhappiness and miseries there are three sources that explain the origin of human’s miseries and these are;

• The human body which is said to be weak and mortal and it can cause pain to humans
• The world which portrays the superiority of nature than humans are unable to control
• Social relations looks at the miseries that result from society, other human beings and social legislations.

Freud’s theory explains behavior as act that has deep mental origins and are regulated by someone’s past experiences that are hidden in their unconscious minds. He further says that someone may even be unable to understand the reason they act the way they do until they became aware of the childhood or past experience behind it. While according to behaviorists the seem to disagree and their arguments looks at behavior as a learned act in that people act the way they act my imitating or learning from other people and they also argue that behavior is response of an external stimuli.

Debating about ethics, morality and evil in consideration with Milgram’s experiment we look at how justified was people’s action in this experiment in the sense of good or bad. The participants in this experiment especially the teachers shows us how society is willing to compromise morality, act unethical and even do evil just to belong to the right side of the authority. People can even shut down their conscious judgment about what is support to be morally good and morally wrong because they don’t to disobey rules given to them.