Psychotherapy Vocabulary

Flashcards for vocabulary review on psychotherapy.

Psychoanalytic Treatment

Uncovering strategies used in varying degrees and blends in psychoanalytic treatment.

Psychoanalysis

A method to discover the meaning and motivation of behavior, especially the unconscious elements that inform thoughts and feelings.

Psychoanalytic Goals

Radical reorganization of old developmental patterns based on earlier affects and the entrenched defenses built up against them.

Psychoanalysis (Structurally)

Individual treatment that is frequent (four or five times per week) and long term (several years).

Psychoanalytic Setting

Offers the patient a temporary sanctuary in which to ease psychic pain and reveal intimate thoughts to an accepting expert.

Fundamental Rule (Free Association)

Requires patients to tell the analyst everything that comes into their heads—however disagreeable, unimportant, or nonsensical.

Principle of Evenly Suspended Attention

Requires the analyst to suspend judgment and to give impartial attention to every detail equally.

Analyst as Mirror

Analysts should be neutral blank screens and not bring their personalities into treatment.

Rule of Abstinence

Refers to the frustration of emotional needs and wishes that the patient may have toward the analyst or part of the transference.

Limitations of Psychoanalysis

Economic, relating to the high cost in time and money, both for patients and in the training of future practitioners.

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Based on fundamental dynamic formulations and techniques that derive from psychoanalysis, designed to broaden its scope.

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (Narrow Sense)

The use of insight-oriented methods only.

Supportive Psychotherapy

The creation of a therapeutic relationship as a temporary buttress or bridge for the deficient patient.

Corrective Emotional Experience

Behavior different from the destructive or unproductive behavior of a patient’s parent.

Brief Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

A time-limited treatment (10 to 12 sessions) based on psychoanalysis and psychodynamic theory.

Group Psychotherapy

A trained leader guiding a group toward individual and collective therapeutic goals, harnessing mutual support, peer interaction, and shared experience.

Family Therapy

Psychotherapeutic work to improve interaction patterns and overall family functioning.

Couples (Marital) Therapy

Psychotherapy to modify interaction between two persons in conflict over social, emotional, sexual, or economic issues.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)

The psychosocial treatment with the most empirical support for patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD); overarching goal is to help create a life worth living for patients suffering from chronic and pervasive problems.

Biofeedback

Involves the recording and display of small changes in physiologic levels of a feedback parameter, using visual or auditory displays.

Autogenic Training

A method of self-suggestion that originated in Germany, involving patients directing attention to specific bodily areas and hearing themselves think certain phrases reflecting a relaxed state.

Applied Tension

Technique opposite to relaxation; it counteracts the fainting response.

Applied Relaxation

Involves eliciting a relaxation response in the stressful situation itself.

Cognitive Therapy

Based on the cognitive model, which posits that it is not situations that directly impact one’s reaction (emotional, behavioral, and physiologic), but one’s automatic perception of the situation that is more closely associated with the reaction.

Strategies and Techniques (Cognitive)

The goal is remission and relapse prevention by teaching lifelong skills within a highly supportive, collaborative relationship.

Behavior Therapy

Changing a person’s observable actions and responses to reduce dysfunction and improve quality of life.

Systematic Desensitization

Overcoming anxiety by gradually approaching feared situations while relaxed; uses a graded hierarchy of anxiety-provoking scenes.

Flooding

Exposes patients directly to feared stimuli in vivo without a hierarchy or relaxation training.

Participant Modeling

Patients learn new behaviors by imitation and observation without performing the behavior until ready.

Assertiveness Training

Enables acting in one’s best interest without undue anxiety, expressing honest feelings comfortably, and exercising personal rights without denying others’ rights.

Aversion Therapy

When a noxious stimulus (punishment) is presented immediately after a specific behavioral response, theoretically, the response is eventually inhibited and extinguished.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

Rapid oscillations of the eyes that occur when a person tracks an object moved back and forth across the line of vision.

Behavioral Activation

Structured attempts to increase overt behaviors that bring patients into contact with reinforcing environmental contingencies and improvements in thoughts, mood, and quality of life.

Hypnosis

A normal activity of a normal mind with focused attention, partially suspended critical judgment, and diminished peripheral awareness.

Interpersonal Therapy (IPT)

A time-limited treatment for major depressive disorder; overall goal is to reduce or eliminate psychiatric symptoms by improving the quality of the patient’s current interpersonal relations and social functioning.

Narrative Medicine

Aims to humanize the clinical encounter through better understanding of patient stories. It helps clinicians "recognize, absorb, interpret, and be moved by the stories of illness."

Narrative Psychiatry

A corrective to overreliance on biologic models, emphasizing the human encounter and incorporating humanities and social sciences.

Communication Among Therapists

Whenever more than one clinician is involved in treatment, there should be regular exchanges of information.

Adherence

Is the degree to which a patient carries out the recommendations of the treating physician. A positive doctor–patient relationship fosters this adherence.

Mentalizing

the social cognitive ability to understand actions in terms of mental states like thoughts and feelings.

Psychoeducational Interventions

Helps individuals understand a psychiatric illness affecting them or loved ones. It includes teaching problem-solving skills, coping strategies, support resources, and communication tools beyond merely providing information.