Psychology A Level

Sigmund Freud has been murdered!

For this series of tasks, we’d like you to find out who killed Sigmund Freud.

TASK 1: Read the crime scene report below.

Crime scene report

Location: Reigate town centre

Victim(s): Sigmund Freud, born 6 May 1856, Professor of Neuropathology at Vienna University, co-founder of the International Psychoanalytical Association (with Carl Jung). Developed the Psychodynamic Approach of Psychology – this claims that our behaviours are caused by our past experiences and our unconscious drives. For example, our personality is determined by unconscious psycho-sexual drives throughout our childhood and adolescence; e.g. from birth until 18 months old, you are in the oral phase, so are obsessed with your mouth/eating/drinking/exploring the world by placing objects in your mouth. If you don’t manage to do this enough, you may become pessimistic, jealous and sarcastic. If you do it too much, you may become optimistic, gullible and needy.

Some people don’t like his ideas as they cannot be tested scientifically and many of his theories are biased against women. Other people do not like the idea of being told they have these subconscious drives that will cause them to be a certain way (deterministic).

Details: Freud was found dead at 07.00 hours. We are still unsure how he died but we found tyre marks near his body from a 1974 Ford Escort and there were large spots of blood on two places on his skull. He died with a look of fear on his face.

Evidence: an American drivers’ licence; an electric shock generator; a baby’s rattle; a bag of stolen items including Bacardi Breezers, clothes and computer games; a Santa mask; cotton wool; tyre mark-prints and notes from a trial about eye-witness testimony; a staff ID from the University of Pennsylvania.

TASK 2: Now read the four fact files below on four different psychologists, all of whom are suspects in the murder.

Fact file A:

Dr Adrian Raine, Professor of Criminology and Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, USA.

Dr Raine is a Biological Psychologist. This means he believes in the Biological Approach. This approach states that human behaviour is caused by physical components of the body, i.e. our hormone levels, brain parts and neurotransmitters.

Raine carried out a famous experiment on murderers and non-murderers. He scanned the brains of 41 murderers who had been charged with murder, but were found to be not guilty for reasons of insanity (NGRI). The murderers had a range of mental disorders, including schizophrenia, head injury, drug abuse, epilepsy, personality disorder and learning disability. He found that they had ‘different’ brains compared to people with the same disorders who hadn’t killed anyone.

He disagrees with many of Freud’s ideas, and in particular doesn’t like that Psychodynamic concepts lack the ability to be scientifically tested.

Fact file B

Stanley Milgram, American Psychologist.

Stanley Milgram is a Social Psychologist. He disagrees with Freud’s idea that internal unconscious psycho-sexual drives influence our behaviour. Instead, Milgram suggests that we are influenced by external factors such as our environment and the people around us. For example, he suggests that we are all likely to be obedient to authority figures such as teachers and police officers.

Milgram conducted a variety of experiments to test his ideas. He used careful controls so that his research was scientific, unlike Freud, who didn’t really attempt to test his ideas scientifically.

However, he has something in common with Freud in that they have both been criticised for being deterministic, that is, suggesting that people don’t have free will when choosing their actions.

Some of Milgram’s experiments have been criticised for being unethical. For example, in one experiment he asked participants to give other people electric shocks.

Fact file C

Professor John Watson and Rosalie Raynor, Behavioural Psychologists.

Rosalie Alberta Raynor was the assistant and second wife of Psychology Professor John B. Watson. Watson and Raynor are famous for their Little Albert experiment where they taught (‘conditioned’) a nine-month-old baby boy called Albert to have a phobia of white rats/rabbits and other white objects.  

They are Behavioural Psychologists. This means they believe all behaviours, including mental health issues, are learnt (and can therefore be unlearnt). Behavioural Psychologists believe that humans are like any other animal and therefore animal studies on rats, mice, monkeys, cats etc. can tell us a lot about human behaviour. Freud agreed with Watson and Raynor’s idea that our behaviours are heavily modified by our upbringing (nurture) but Freud also believed in an interactionist approach: that our psyche and behaviour is a result of both nurture and nature (our genes, chemical levels and biological drives). Watson and Raynor strongly oppose the nature argument of behaviour and say all behaviour is due to our environments. In 1930, Watson published his book Behaviourism, in which he famously said:

“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and the race of his ancestors.”

Fact File D

Dr Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer, Cognitive Psychologists.

As Cognitive Psychologists, Dr Loftus and John Palmer believe that behaviour is down to our internal mental processes, like attention, memory and perception.

Professor Elizabeth Loftus is probably one of the best-known living psychologists. She is famous for her extensive research (with Palmer) on eye witness testimony and, more recently, false memories. She is often called as an expert witness in court cases to testify about the unreliability of memory, such as in the Michael Jackson case, and she has received countless awards such as the 2001 American Psychological Association (APA) Award for “ingeniously and rigorously designed research studies… on difficult and controversial questions”. John Palmer is a Research Professor at the University of Washington, specialising in visual attention.

Loftus and Palmer disagree with Freud’s unscientific methods and think that he should have developed ‘ingeniously and rigorously designed research’, like they did.

Loftus is famous for empowering female psychologists and for raising the profile of females in published psychological work (90% of undergraduate psychologists are female; only 6% of published psychological work is by female authors! (APA, 2006)). Freud famously stated that women are inferior to males and are jealous of male power. He also said that women have Penis Envy and an Electra Complex (the suppression of sexual feelings towards your male caregiver leading to hating your female caregiver throughout adolescence) which leads to women having behavioural problems/mental health issues.

Sigmund Freud’s views on women stirred controversy during his own lifetime and continue to evoke considerable debate today. “Women oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own,” he wrote in a 1925 paper entitled ‘The Psychical Consequences of the Anatomic Distinction Between the Sexes.’

TASK 3: Now that you’ve read the crime scene report and the four fact files on four different psychologists, we’d like you to copy out and fill in the table below and decide who you think killed Sigmund Freud and why.

Remember, each psychologist supports a particular approach: Biological, Social, Behavioural and Cognitive.You will need to find a reason from the fact files which suggests that the psychologist in question might have disliked Freud enough to kill him. You’ll also need to find a piece of evidence from the crime scene that links that person to the crime.

We hope you enjoyed finding out more about psychological approaches through this imaginary scenario, and we’re looking forward to hearing your conclusions when we start the course.