PSYC 3140 Lecture Notes - Conversion Disorder, Neurology, Psychopathology
16 Oct 2011
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Abnormal- interferes with daily living, breaks away from social norm, harms others, unusual in the population; statistical infrequency. Many of the weird behaviours are context dependent; understanding the context is critical. If it"s a characteristic that we all have, we don"t think it"s abnormal. Even if it"s a characteristic that we don"t like, we don"t assume that it"s a psychological abnormality because it"s frequent. We have to put it in the context that the behaviour occurs in but also in the context of the culture and the historical time period. He was not a psychiatrist or a psychologist but a neurologist. Some of his earlier studies were about neural processes in frogs. He was interested in the physical in the neurological system. He developed psychoanalysis because his costumers weren"t satisfied with just his previous physiological explanation. He discovered that many of the individual with hysterical blindness were actually individuals with severe psychological problems such as losses, sexual abuse, etc.
