The psychoanalytic lens

The lens in brief

Psychoanalysis was founded by Sigmund Freud in Vienna around 1900. It holds that much of mental life is unconscious, meaning outside our awareness, and that early relationships and inner conflicts shape how we feel and act. People protect themselves from painful feelings with defence mechanisms, often without knowing it. Psychoanalysts learn mainly from long clinical work with individuals, including children at play.

The Bobo doll study was partly a reply to this tradition. Its discussion argues directly against the psychoanalytic explanation of how children learn aggression. And its result went against a famous prediction linked to psychoanalysis, that expressing or watching aggression releases it.

How this lens reads the study

Catharsis. Freud, especially in his later work, wrote of an aggressive drive within every person. A popular version of this idea is catharsis: expressing aggression in a harmless way releases the pressure and leaves a person calmer. The researchers took this idea seriously enough to build it into the design. They frustrated all the children before the test partly because earlier research (Rosenbaum & deCharms, 1960) suggested that watching aggression reduces the watcher's own aggression. They worried that children who had just watched aggression would be under "weaker instigation", less ready to aggress, unless every child was mildly frustrated first (p. 576). The study found the opposite of catharsis: children who watched aggression did more of it, not less. A psychoanalyst could reply that the study measured aggression only while it was happening. It never checked whether the children were calmer afterwards.

Displacement. Just before the test, an adult took the best toys away from each child. A psychoanalyst would see this as a real emotional event: a powerful grown-up caused a loss, and the child could not object. Displacement is a defence in which feelings towards a dangerous target are redirected to a safer one. Hitting the doll may have been anger at the experimenter, moved onto a target that could not punish back.

Identification with the aggressor. In 1936 Anna Freud described a defence she called identification with the aggressor. A child who feels small and frightened in front of a powerful, aggressive person may cope by becoming like that person. In her words, "by impersonating the aggressor, assuming his attributes or imitating his aggression, the child transforms himself from the person threatened into the person who makes the threat" (A. Freud, 1937, p. 121). This was the main explanation that the Bobo paper set out to replace. A psychoanalyst could still apply it to the study: a large adult attacked something, and a second adult then took the child's toys away. Copying the attack could be a way of feeling strong rather than helpless. This reading predicts that the most anxious children would copy most. The study never tested it.

Bandura's reply. The paper argues that identification is not needed. Its models were "more or less neutral figures" whom the children did not love or fear, yet the children copied them. The authors concluded that "mere observation of aggression, regardless of the quality of the model-subject relationship, is a sufficient condition for producing imitative aggression in children" (pp. 581-582). They also suggested the study that would settle the question: compare models who are feared, models who are liked, and neutral models.

The doll as a symbol. In child psychoanalysis, play is the child's way of expressing what they cannot say. Melanie Klein used small toys in therapy and read children's play as a window into their inner world. A psychoanalyst would notice that the study used a play situation, but read the play only as a count of acts.

What this lens values in the study

It would value the study's recognition that frustration matters, since the researchers frustrated the children on purpose because they expected it to release aggression. It would also value the children's spontaneous remarks, which the paper reports. Comments such as "He's a good fighter like Daddy" show the children linking the model to people they love, which is the kind of material psychoanalysis works with.

What it would question

• Meaning. Counting punches says nothing about what each child felt or what the doll stood for.
• Time. One 20-minute session cannot show inner change. Psychoanalytic understanding comes from many sessions.
• The frustration step. Deliberately frustrating young children and then watching them is ethically troubling, and the study did not check how the children felt afterwards.

A modern psychoanalytic critique

In 2022 the Greek researchers Galanaki and Malafantis published a psychoanalytic critique of Bandura's experiments in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. They argue that "in the eyes of the children, the experimenters were omnipotent adult figures with authority, prestige, and power", so the children's copying cannot be separated from their relationship to these powerful adults. They also suggest that the children's inventiveness, the new variations they added to the model's acts, "may be regarded as proof of the playful character of the imitation". In other words, what the study called aggression may have been play shaped by the wish to please or to be like a powerful grown-up.

Evidence from this tradition and against it

The catharsis idea has been tested many times since 1961, and mostly fails. Brad Bushman (2002) had angry students hit a punching bag while thinking about the person who angered them. They were afterwards more aggressive towards that person than students who sat quietly. This supports Bandura's side of the argument.

The idea of identification with the aggressor remains important in clinical work, particularly with children and adults who have experienced abuse. It is supported mainly by case studies, not by experiments.

A study this lens would design

A psychoanalytic researcher would work with fewer children for longer.

1. Hold several play sessions with each child, with a range of toys including dolls that can stand for family members.
2. Introduce a model who is someone the child is attached to, such as a parent, as well as a stranger, to see whether the relationship changes the effect.
3. Record what the child says and does in play, and how play changes after the model and after frustration.
4. Interview parents about the child's relationships and recent stresses.
5. Check the child's mood and anxiety before and after.

The aim would not be to count acts but to understand why a particular child used aggressive play, and what it did for them.

Try this

In a replication, a girl who had just had the fire engine taken away goes straight to the Bobo doll, hits it twice with the mallet while saying 'That's for taking my toys!', and then plays calmly with the tea set for the rest of the session.

How would a psychoanalytic reading and Bandura's reading differ, and which detail supports the psychoanalytic one?

Show the reasoning

Bandura's reading would count two acts of mallet aggression and ask whether she had seen an aggressive model. The psychoanalytic reading focuses on the words she used: her anger is about the adult who took her toys, but she directs it at the doll, which is displacement. Her calm play afterwards could be read as a short release of feeling.

The detail that supports the psychoanalytic reading is the content of her speech, which links the hitting to the earlier loss. A count of acts alone would miss it. (This girl is an invented example.)