A young child’s answer to the question ‘where do babies come from?’ The navel appears to be a firm favourite.

The microelectronic means of transmitting, processing and using information whether as words, numbers or images.

The idea that the course of events is influenced at crucial times by the actions of outstanding men. As a way of understanding history it is a gross over-simplification.

Freud’s work may be divided into three areas; his invention of PSYCHOANALYSIS as a therapeutic technique, his theory of PERSONALITY and his social PHILOSOPHY. The origins of Freud’s ideas are more overtly personal that those of any other psychologist: it was an attempt to understand himself that led to the development of psychoanalysis. His father’s death brought DREAMS that troubled him, and in trying to make sense of them, he found the way through to his own UNCONSCIOUS and his unresolved ambivalent feelings about his father and about the Jewishness his father represented. The result was his first major work ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, widely regarded as his most original and influential book and the springboard for the rest of his thought.

On the basis of his own Oedipus complex and of his work with patients, Freud developed a theory of personality which emphasised the crucial importance of the first five years of life in determining the development of the EGO and SUPEREGO and their interrelations with the ID in the adult personality. Freud became increasingly concerned with applying his thinking to the human condition in general and in a series of books,’Totem and Taboo’,’The Future of an Illusion’, and ‘Civilization and lts Discontents’, he worked out the implications of his belief that REPRESSION and its resultant NEUROSIS was the inevitable price mankind paid for civilization.

While each of Freud’s ideas is still hotly debated, by Freudians and anti-Freudians alike, few people would dispute his enormous and widespread influence in making the twentieth century more aware than any previous age of the power of the irrational and the unconscious in human affairs.

A school of PSYCHOLOGY which emphasises the Junctions or activities of the MIND rather than its content, which is the emphasis of its rival, STRUCTURALISM.

Differences between parents and children in attitudes, beliefs, opinions and values which are attributed at least in part to the effects of being socialised at different times: used to explain conflict between young people and older people. As generation gaps have been evident since the world began, there may well be something to this, though the gap may be more apparent than real.

See also COHORT EFFECT, SOCIALISATION and ZEITGEIST.

The study of the psychological factors involved in legal issues such as criminal behaviour, decision-making by juries and EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY.

The concept, suggested by the American psychologist Gordon Allport. that a particular behaviour which was originally engaged in to achieve a certain goal may itself become a goal. This idea may be relevant in examples of EXTRINSIC MOTIVATION becoming intrinsic. For example, a child who practises the violin because his parents won’t love him or give him any pocket money if he doesn’t may come to enjoy the activity of playing the violin for its own sake (and grow up to be a concert musician).

An individual’s genetically inherited potential.

See PHENOTYPE.

See ERGONOMICS.