Theories of Psychotherapy: Adlerian, Person-Centered, Existential, and Gestalt Therapy

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards reviewing the four primary therapeutic approaches from the lecture notes: Adlerian Therapy, Person-Centered Therapy, Existential Psychotherapy, and Gestalt Therapy.

Teleology

The philosophical and psychological perspective adopted by Alfred Adler that explains human behavior in terms of goals, future purposes, and striving forward, in contrast to Freud's deterministic view focused on past childhood causes.

Gemeinschaftsgefühl

A German term translated as 'social interest' or 'community feeling'; Adler's core indicator of mental health, characterized by sharing with others, caring for their welfare, cooperation, and contributing to the common good.

Universal Life Tasks

The three core developmental and social challenges identified by Adler that every human must navigate: building friendships, establishing intimacy, and contributing to society.

Style of Life

An Adlerian concept describing an individual's characteristic stance developed toward life, its challenges, and its tasks, reflecting how they understand themselves and the world.

Private Logic

An individual's unique internal cognitive blueprint encompassing who they are, how they perceive the world, what goals they pursue, and how they behave to achieve those goals.

Adlerian Assessment of Private Logic

The systematic examination of a client's subjective convictions across six areas: Self-concept ('Who am I?'), Self-ideal ('Who should I be?'), The World ('What are the rules of life?'), Ethical beliefs ('Convictions/right and wrong'), Goal ('What I'm drawn to'), and Methods ('How to achieve goal').

Inferiority Feelings

Universal, non-pathological feelings seen by Adler as the normal source of all human striving, personal growth, and creativity, prompting individuals to work hard and overcome obstacles.

Inferiority Complex

A pathological state in Adlerian psychology that occurs when an individual becomes overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy and feels unable to overcome life's difficulties.

Superiority Complex

A psychological defense mechanism used to mask underlying inferiority feelings, often demonstrated through arrogant, boastful, or bullying behavior.

Adlerian Birth Order Profiles

Adler's framework positing that sibling position shapes characteristic personality tendencies: First Borns (perfectionist, leader, bossy, responsible), Middle Borns (adaptable, peacemaker, independent), Last Borns (charming, social, outgoing, manipulative), and The Only Child (confident, conscientious, center of attention, mature).

Basic Mistakes

Cognitive myths and cognitive distortions that individuals confuse with objective truth in their personal mythology, classified into overgeneralization, false goals of security, misperceptions of life's demands, minimization/denial of worth, and faulty values.

Immediacy

A therapeutic intervention focusing on what is happening in the 'here and now' between client and therapist, exploring the purposeful reason behind a client's in-the-moment behavior.

Acting As If

An Adlerian technique where clients are encouraged to role-play or behave as the person they would like to become ('fake it till you make it') to develop new patterns of action.

Catching Oneself

An Adlerian technique wherein clients learn to identify and stop their self-defeating behaviors or irrational patterns as soon as they become conscious of them during daily life.

Push Button Technique

An Adlerian cognitive intervention illustrating that individuals can choose and change their emotional states simply by deliberately redirecting their thoughts and focus.

Paradoxical Intention

A technique where the client is instructed to intentionally exaggerate an unwanted symptom or irrational behavior to highlight its absurdity and gain mastery over it.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

A motivational theory proposed by Abraham Harold Maslow in his 1954 book 'Motivation and Personality', establishing that lower basic deficit needs (Physiological, Safety, Love/Belonging, Esteem) must be met before higher growth needs (Self-Actualization) can be achieved.

Self-Actualization

The innate human drive and motivation to fulfill one's potential, move toward wholeness, and realize personal capabilities when provided with the proper growth conditions.

Direct Experience

In Person-Centered therapy, what an individual genuinely feels, senses, needs, and encounters organically in the moment, prior to conceptual distortion.

Incongruence

A state of discrepancy in Person-Centered therapy between one's direct experiencing and their organized self-concept, resulting in vulnerability, internal tension, and anxiety.

Conditions of Worth

Expectations and standards imposed by significant others (such as parents) where approval and love are made contingent upon specific behaviors or accomplishments, leading the child to disown aspects of their genuine experience.

Unconditional Positive Regard

A core condition in Person-Centered therapy wherein the therapist provides deep, non-possessive warmth, acceptance, and prize of the client without judgment, evaluation, or reservation.

Accurate Empathic Understanding

The therapist's ability to grasp the client's private subjective world from their internal frame of reference 'as if' it were their own, without losing their own separateness or confusing it with sympathy.

Content vs. Process

The distinction in therapeutic listening between 'Content' (what is specifically spoken, including facts, words, and stories) and 'Process' (how the content is conveyed, including nonverbal cues, posture, pacing, and relationship dynamics).

Locus of Evaluation

The internal or external source from which an individual establishes their standards of judgment and assesses their personal worth and life choices.

Angst

A philosophical concept coined by Søren Kierkegaard denoting the deep existential dread and anxiety that arises from confronting human freedom, responsibility, and choice.

Logotherapy

The existential therapeutic school developed by Viktor Frankl centered on helping clients discover and pursue subjective meaning in life, even amid unavoidable suffering.

Existential Vacuum

A state of pervasive inner emptiness, hollowness, and boredom identified by Viktor Frankl that emerges when an individual's life lacks a clear sense of meaning or purpose.

Four Human Concerns

The four core existential givens identified by Irvin Yalom that provoke profound inner conflict and anxiety: death, freedom/responsibility, isolation, and meaninglessness.

Inauthenticity

The attempt to escape existential freedom and personal responsibility by defining oneself as a static, helpless entity controlled entirely by external forces or social conditioning.

Existential Guilt

The acute awareness of having evaded an existential commitment, having chosen not to choose, or having failed to realize one's authentic potential.

Normal Anxiety vs. Existential Neurotic Anxiety

The distinction in existential therapy between 'normal anxiety' (a proportionate, growth-promoting response to a genuine life event) and 'existential neurotic anxiety' (a disproportionate, paralyzing dread that develops when an individual avoids confronting existential givens).

Gestalt

A German word meaning 'perceptual whole' or 'configuration'; the foundation of Gestalt psychology asserting that human perception and mental functioning naturally form integrated wholes rather than disconnected parts.

Perls' Therapeutic Focus Cycle

The Gestalt framework centered on 'The I-and-thou in the here-and-now', integrating five circular dynamics: present self-awareness, reintegrating disowned parts, authentic contact (congruence), shifting to self-support (ownership), and promoting individualism with self-responsibility (maturity).

Figure Formation Process

A Gestalt principle describing how an aspect of the environmental or internal field emerges into sharp focus as the 'figure' (foreground) from the 'ground' (background) based on an individual's current needs.

Organismic Self-Regulation

The innate process whereby an organism experiences a bodily sensation or need that disrupts equilibrium, brings it to awareness, and takes action to restore balance.

Contact and Resistances to Contact

In Gestalt therapy, 'Contact' is interacting fully with the environment and others while preserving individuality; 'Resistances to Contact' (boundary disturbances) are defense mechanisms deployed to avoid full present experiencing.

Introjection

A Gestalt resistance to contact characterized by uncritically accepting or 'swallowing whole' the beliefs, values, and standards of others without assimilating or evaluating them.

Projection

A Gestalt boundary disturbance where an individual disowns their own unwanted attributes, feelings, or impulses and attributes them to other people in the environment.

Retroflexion

A Gestalt defense mechanism where a person turns an impulse, energy, or feeling back toward themselves (such as self-blame or self-harm) rather than directing it outward toward the environment.

Deflection

A Gestalt boundary disturbance that avoids direct contact and emotional intensity through maneuvers such as changing the subject, excessive humor, generalization, or intellectualization.

Confluence

A Gestalt boundary disturbance marked by a blurring of the boundary between self and others, leading to an over-identification, avoidance of conflict, and loss of distinct individuality.

Unfinished Business

Unexpressed or unresolved feelings from the past (such as lingering resentment, grief, guilt, or anger) that persist into the present and interfere with authentic, effective functioning.

Impasse

The point in Gestalt therapy where a client feels completely stuck because their habitual, obsolete coping strategies no longer work and external support is no longer available.

Empty Chair Technique

A classic Gestalt therapeutic experiment where a client addresses an empty chair representing an imagined significant person or a split-off part of their own personality to resolve unfinished business in the present moment.