chapter 8 Psychoanalytic, Psychodynamic, Humanis Humanistic Psychotherapies

Psychoanalytic, Psychodynamic, and Humanistic Psychotherapies

Chapter Overview

• Focus on specific approaches to psychotherapy divided into families based on shared concepts and practices.

  • Types of therapies covered:

  • Psychoanalytic

  • Psychodynamic

  • Humanistic

Psychoanalysis

Overview of Freud's Psychoanalysis

• Definition of Psychoanalysis: A theory linking personality traits and psychological disorders to unconscious conflicts originating from early childhood relationships.

• Past important

• Key Concepts:

  • Emphasizes the significance of insight into primitive drives, unconscious conflicts, and relational patterns.

  • Treatment methods involve therapists interpreting client behaviors to understand unconscious motivators.

  • Attachment theory: repeat patterns that come from the past, lack of insight

  • Transference: Clients project patterns from past relationships onto the therapist, revealing unconscious conflicts.

• Research Background:

  • Limited empirical support for psychoanalytic therapy compared to other psychotherapeutic methods.

Freud's Theory of Personality and Psychopathology

• Topographical Model of the Mind:

  • Describes mental life as a continuum of:

  • Conscious awareness

  • Preconscious awareness

  • Unconscious level (accessed through therapy techniques).

• Structure of Personality:

  • Id: Source of primal drives (sexual, aggressive), present from birth.

  • Ego: Mediates between id impulses and reality, balancing desires against social norms.

  • Superego: Represents moral conscience developed through societal and familial norms.

• Conflict: Intrapsychic turmoil forms the basis of psychological symptoms and disorders.

Defense Mechanisms

• Define how the ego manages anxiety from conflicts:

  • Denial: Refusal to acknowledge a problem.

  • Repression: Pushing unwanted thoughts into the unconscious.

  • Projection: Attributing one’s own negative traits to others.

  • Reaction Formation: Exhibiting behaviors that are the opposite of one's true feelings.

  • Displacement: Redirecting feelings to a safer target.

  • Rationalization: Offering logical explanations for irrational behavior.

  • Sublimation: Channeling unacceptable impulses into socially acceptable actions.

Foundations of Psychoanalytic Therapy

• Techniques evolved from treatment methods to address hysteria symptoms (e.g., paralysis, amnesia) with a focus on discovering and addressing unconscious conflicts.

• Cathartic Method: Developed from working with Anna O, encouraging clients to articulate suppressed emotions.

• Free Association: Clients share thoughts freely to uncover unconscious material, contrasting with hypnosis for clients unable to achieve trance states.

• Importance of Dreams: Freud analyzed dreams as expressions of unconscious wishes and desires.

Psychoanalytic Techniques and Goals

• Major techniques include:

  • Exploration of transference and countertransference.

  • Interpretation of slips of the tongue and behavior.

  • Focus on the therapeutic relationship as a reflection of other relational dynamics.

• Working Through: Engaging with insights to reinforce changes and understanding of conflicts.

• Resistance: Recognized as a manifestation of anxiety about confronting unresolved conflicts.

Case Study: Rachel Jackson's Psychoanalysis

• Description of a typical case involving Rachel’s mother, revealing psychological implications related to familial dynamics and personal trauma. Emphasizes the role of the therapist in crafting a conducive therapeutic relationship.

Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

Overview and Characteristics

• Focuses on current interpersonal relationships, shifting away from classic Freudian emphasis on sexuality and aggressive instincts to a more adaptive function of the ego.

• Concentrates on early relationships and supports the healing property of the therapeutic alliance.

Key Psychodynamic Therapists and Theories

• Alfred Adler: Stressed the importance of social relationships and striving for superiority.

• Carl Jung: Focused on the collective unconscious and personal growth, emphasizing the importance of the ego.

• Attachment theory: lack of insight of familiarity in patterns

Ego Psychology: Examined functions of the ego to facilitate learning and creativity beyond mere control of id impulses. Ego strength, see one’s self as an autonomous person.

• Object Relations Theory: Explores how early attachment styles influence interpersonal relationships in adulthood.

• Relational Psychodynamic Therapy: Emerged after Sullivan, emphasizing the dynamic between therapist-client relationships and their impact on treatment.

Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT)

Overview of IPT

• Originated in the 1970s, focusing on the relationship between life events and symptoms of psychological disorders.

• Core components:

  • Emphasizes social relationships and transitions as key to understanding psychological problems.

  • Treatment spans approximately four months, often with weekly sessions aimed at addressing interpersonal conflicts.

• Four Key Interpersonal Challenges:

  1. Loss of a loved one.

  2. Role conflicts within relationships.

  3. Life transitions (like parenthood or retirement).

  4. Social isolation.

KEY NOTES FROM CLASS

Major techniques include:

• Maintains neutrality > remain equidistant from the client (physical space), psychodynamic therapists watch what happens with the client

• Making interpretations > start to point out ways the past may be intruding on the present

• Promote insight > when client starts to develop awareness of past and present they help promote that awareness

• Working through> deeply emotionally process it and working with those emotions in order to handle the experiences that were experienced

• Therapeutic alliance

Psychodynamic

1. Attachment theory

2. Lack of insight

3. Ego: autonomy

4. Transference: client projects past relationship and perspectives onto the therapist

5. Symbolic behavior

6. Resistance: you talk about really hard frightening things ( good sign) digging deep

7. Defense mechanisms: all kinds of ways the ego attempts to defend against all the unwanted, impulses, desires that we have.

8. There are no reupptures and relationship is trusting so promoting insight is easier

9. Psychodynamic allows the client to have multiple perspectives

A. Offering interpretations

B. Freudian slip

C. Major moment of insight > major for change

D. Emotional processing > evidence based process

Transference therapy

Internalization therapy

Metallization therapy

Humanistic Psychotherapy

Overview

• Engages with present individual experiences and consciousness, rejecting a solely past-focused narrative.

• Focuses on the therapeutic relationship as the primary method of promoting healing and self-acceptance.

• Phenomenology: explore our unique selves everyone is completely different

Major Humanistic Therapies

1. Person-Centered Therapy (Carl Rogers)

   • Emphasizes positive regard, empathy, and congruence.

   • Clients lead their own growth and therapy goals without judgment or diagnosis.

2. Gestalt Therapy (Fritz Perls)

   • Focus on the present and awareness of emotions and physical sensations.

   • Uses role-playing, the empty chair technique, and confrontation to build self-awareness.

3. Existential Therapy

   • Concerned with issues of meaning, existence, and the individual's capacity for responsibility.

   • Encourages clients to engage with and explore deep-seated life questions.

Emerging Humanistic Techniques

• Motivational Interviewing: Helps clients resolve ambivalence towards change using empathetic reflection.

• Emotion-Focused Therapy: Focuses on emotional processing and the expression of feelings in therapeutic contexts.

Conclusion

• The importance of the therapeutic relationship in psychodynamic and humanistic therapy is paramount, though they differ in approach, focus, and some theoretical underpinnings.

• Despite shifts in therapeutic practices, the humanistic approach remains influential in many therapists' methodologies, integrating concepts of growth, acceptance, and client-directed goals.

Test Yourself Questions

1. The most important curative factor in humanistic psychotherapy is the therapeutic relationship.

2. True or False: Humanistic therapists usually diagnose their clients.

3. The most philosophically based form of humanistic treatment is Existential Therapy.

All the therapies discussed—Psychoanalytic, Psychodynamic, and Humanistic

• share a common emphasis on the therapeutic relationship and alliance as a vital component between the therapist and the client.

• Both of have an insight component in focusing on exploring clients' thoughts and feelings, understanding their interpersonal relationships, and facilitating personal growth through increased self-awareness.

• While they differ in their specific approaches and theoretical underpinnings, the goal of fostering insight and emotional processing remains central across these therapies.

• Psychodynamic pessimistic

KEY NOTES

1. Universal problems of human existence: death, lack of relationships (belongingness), being fundamentally alone, lack of control, freedom, conflict.

2. All doing our best, being human is really hard and we all suffer and we are facing these major struggles of existence, we also can lead towards rich lives even with those extasential therapy

How to I make meaning with this?

A. Carl Roger’s: Person-centered therapy: an approach where the entire approach is about forming a therapeutic relationship that allows people who that really are authentically separate from all the should, could , etc. feel completely safe to share authentically.

• reflective listening

• Completely non directive no guidance

• Used reflection to help the client to figure out what the answers are within the client

• Deliver a lot of empathy and non judgmental

• gestalt therapy

1. More dierective

2. pointing incongruence

3. Pay attention to non verbal to verbals

Understand contemporary psychodynamic theory

1. Therapeutic alliance

2. Insight

3. Focus on past to present

Techniques

1. Working through

2. mainting neutrality

Humanistic

1. Person center therapy

2. Humans are inharently good

3. Moral injury > you do something that does not meet your moral standards (what happens when you do this

4. Resilience in humans

Techniques

1. Congruence

2. Reflective listening

3. Non judgmental