A-Level Psychology: Approaches — Psychodynamic and Comparison of Approaches

Approaches questions in A-level Psychology go beyond describing each approach: they ask you to apply psychodynamic concepts to behaviour and to compare approaches with one another, an explicit point in current specifications (for example AQA's A-level Psychology for first teaching from September 2025). This material covers both, and links the comparison to the issues and debates that essays on approaches draw on, including levels of explanation and the scientific emphasis on causal explanations.

The psychodynamic questions go into the detail that shorter overviews leave out. You put Freud's psychosexual stages in order, recognise an anal-retentive personality as the result of fixation, explain how the Oedipus complex is resolved through castration anxiety and identification, and identify denial and displacement in everyday scenarios. A question on Little Hans shows how Freud interpreted a childhood phobia and why that interpretation is contested.

The comparison questions place the behaviourist, social learning, cognitive, biological, psychodynamic and humanistic approaches side by side. You decide which approaches are psychically, environmentally or biologically deterministic and which defends free will; which takes the most extreme nurture position; why a claim that depression is 'simply a lack of serotonin' is biologically reductionist; how explanations of depression can be ordered from the biochemical through the psychological to the social level; why the psychodynamic approach struggles with the scientific emphasis on causal, falsifiable explanations; and which research methods each approach typically uses.

The material offers four formats. The 12-question quiz gives an explanation after every answer. The 17 flashcards summarise the stages, defence mechanisms and each approach's position in the debates. The printable written work sets eight open questions, from short outlines to an extended comparison of two approaches, with ruled space for handwritten answers that are then checked. In the oral exam an examiner asks one question at a time, pushes you to compare rather than describe and gives precise feedback at the end.

It builds on the category's materials on behaviourism and social learning and on the cognitive and humanistic approaches, and prepares you for the extended comparison questions that approaches and issues-and-debates essays often require.

• Describe Freud's psychosexual stages and explain fixation and the Oedipus complex
• Apply the defence mechanisms of repression, denial and displacement to scenarios
• Evaluate the psychodynamic approach, including the Little Hans case study
• Compare the approaches on free will and determinism, nature and nurture, and reductionism and holism
• Explain levels of explanation and the scientific emphasis on causal explanations
• Match approaches to the research methods they typically use

Practice material written by Zestly, based on A-level Psychology specifications (for example AQA A-level Psychology 7182, specification for first teaching from September 2025: 4.2.1 Approaches in Psychology, the psychodynamic approach and comparison of approaches, and 4.3.1 Issues and debates, levels of explanation and the scientific emphasis on causal explanations).