Clinical Psychology Flashcards
The therapies categorized as psychodynamic share which assumptions?
- Human behavior is motivated largely by unconscious processes
- Early development has a profound effect on adult functioning
- Universal principles explain personality development and behavior
- Insight into unconscious processes is a key component of psychotherapy
What are the main psychodynamic psyotherapies?
- Freud’s psychoanalysis
- Adlers Individual psychology
- Jung’s analytical psychotherapy
- Various object-relations theorists
Worldview underlying Freudian psychoanalysis?
Essentially pessimistic, deterministic, mechanistic, and reductionistic. According to Freud, human beings are determined by irrational forces, unconscious motivations, biological and instinctual needs and drives, and psychosexual events that occurred during the first five years of life
Freud’s personality theory
Freud’s personality theory consist of two separate, but interrelated theories: a structural drive theory and a development theory
Freuds structural drive theory
Posits the personality with three structures- the id, the ego, and the superego
Id
Present at birth and consists of the person’s life and death instincts, which serve as the source of all psychic energy. It operates on the basis of the pleasure principle and seeks immediate gratification of its instinctual drives and needs in order to avoid tension.
Ego
Develops at about six months of age in response to the id’s inability to gratify all of its needs and operates on the basis of the reality principle. It defers gratification of the id’s instincts until an appropriate object is available in reality and employs secondary process thinking, which is characterized by realistic, rational thinking and planning.
What is the primary task of the ego?
To mediate the often conflicting demands of the id and reality and, once it has developed, the superego.
Superego
Emerges when a child is between four and five years of age and represents an internalization of society’s values and standards as conveyed to the child by his or her parents through their rewards and punishments.
How does the superego differ from the ego in terms of dealing with the id?
In contrast to the ego, which postpones, gratification of the id’s instincts, the superego attempts to permanently block the id’s socially unacceptable impulses.
Freud’s developmental theory
Emphasizes the sexual drives of the id and proposes that an individual’s personality is formed during childhood as the result of certain experiences that occur during five predetermined psychosexual stages of development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital).
How does Freud describe anxiety’s function?
To alert the ego to an impending internal or external threat.
According to Freud, when are defense mechanisms used?
When the ego is unable to ward off danger through rational, realistic means. They serve to deny or distort reality.
What are some basic defense mechanisms?
repression, reaction formation, projection
What is the goal of psychoanalytic psychotherapy?
To reduce or eliminate pathological symptoms by bringing the unconscious into conscious awareness and integrating previously repressed material into the personality
What is psychic determinism?
The belief that all behaviors are meaningful and serve some psychological function
What is the primary technique of psychoanalysis and what does it target?
Analysis; the main targets of analysis are the client’s free associations, dreams, resistances, and transferences.
What techniques do analysts use?
Confrontation, clarification, interpretation, an working through
Improvement in psychoanalysis is attributed to a combination of what three factors?
Catharsis, insight, and working through
Catharsis
The emotional release resulting from the recall of unconscious material; paves the way for the client’s insight into the relationship between his or her unconscious processes and current behaviors
Working through
The final and longest stage in psychoanalysis; allows the client to gradually assimilate new insights into his or her personality
Confrontation (in psychoanalysis)
Entails making statements that help the client see his or her behavior in a new way
Clarification (in psychoanalysis)
Involves clarifying the client’s feelings and restating his or her remarks in clearer terms
Interpretation (in psychoanalysis)
Explicitly connecting current behavior to unconscious processes
When are interpretation less likely to elicit anxiety and resistance?
When they address motives and conflicts close to a client’s consciousness rather than when they related to material buried deep in the unconscious
What characteristics do brief psychodynamic therapies share?
- Time limited
- Target a specific interpersonal problem that is usually identified in the first session
- Begin using interpretation early in the therapeutic relationship
- Emphasize the development of a strong working alliance
- Positive transference is considered more important than negative transference because it promotes a positive therapeutic relationship, maximized the client’s motivation to work toward the achievement of therapeutic goals, and reduces the likelihood that progress in therapy will be slowed down by the development of a full-scale transference neurosis
In what ways did Adler agree and disagree with Freud?
While Adler agreed that all behavior is purposeful, he disagreed with Freud’s emphasis on the role of unconscious instinctual/sexual forces in the development of personality and lack of attention to social factors
How does Adler’s teleological approach regard behavior?
As being largely motivated by a person’s future goals rather than determined by past events
Key concepts in Adler’s individual psychology
Inferiority feelings, striving for superiority, style of life, and social interest
When do inferiority feelings begin to develop and what are they the result of? (Adler)
They develop during childhood as the result of real or perceived biological, psychological, or social weaknesses
What is striving for superiority according to Adler?
An inherent tendency toward “perfect completion.”
The specific ways a person chooses to compensate for inferiority and achieve superiority determine his or her ________________, which unifies the various aspects of the personality.
Style of life
How does Adler view maladaptive behavior?
For Adler, mental disorders represent a mistaken style of life, which is characterized by maladaptive attempts to compensate for feelings of inferiority, a preoccupation with achieving personal power, and a lack of social interest
While a _____________is characterized by goals that reflect optimism, confidence, and concern about the welfare of others, a _____________ is characterized by goals reflecting self-centeredness, competitiveness, and striving for personal power.
healthy style of life; mistaken style of life
___________________ is based on Adler’s approach and assumes that all behavior is goal-directed and purposeful. For instance, the misbehavior of young children is viewed as having one of four goals- attention, power, revenge, or to display deficiency- with each goal reflecting a desire to belong, accompanied by faulty beliefs about what is needed to do so.
Systematic Training for Effective Teaching (STET)
What is an effective way to work with many African American clients?
Several authorizes recommend the use of an ecostructural or ecological systemic approach (see Boyd-Franklin’s multisystems model); These address multiple systems, intervene at multiple levels, and empower the family by utilizing strengths
What are some issues Walker and LaDue advise mental health practitioners to be aware of when working with American Indians?
- Become familiar with historical events that have affected their lives
- May prefer a therapist who helps them reaffirm the values of their culture
- May be distrustful of a therapist’s attempts to provide therapy in a “value-free” environment
In working with American Indians, LaFromboise et al. recommend the use of ______, which incorporates family and community members into the treatment process and situates and individual’s psychological problems within the context of his/her family, workplace, community, and other social systems
Network therapy
What type of therapy is often preferred when working with Asian Americans?
A directive, structured, goal-oriented, problem-solving approach that focuses on alleviating specific symptoms; Cognitive-behavioral, solution-focused, and other brief therapies are often effective but may need to be modified so they focus more on the family than on an individual and take into account cultural and social factors.
When working with an Hispanic or Latino client, a therapist is usually best advised to be ________ and _________ and to adopt a _____________ approach that focuses on the client’s behavior, affect, cognitions, interpersonal relationships, biological functioning, etc.
active; directive; multimodal
What is true about LGBT individuals in terms of certain psychological problems?
As a group, youth who identify as nonheterosexual are more likely than their heterosexual peers to experience depression, anxiety, and substance use and to have a higher risk for suicidality. This is not due to sexual orientation itself but to the prejudice and discrimination that LGBT individuals encounter
This occurs when LGBT individuals accept heterosexual society’s negative evaluations of them and incorporate these into their self-concepts
Internalized homophobia
Studies investigating the coming out process found that adolescent males had an earlier onset of all milestones except for which of the following:
a) Same-sex attraction
b) self-labeling
c) first same-sex sexual contact
d) first disclosure of sexual orientation to another person
d
Sue and Sue describe which three competencies involved in cultural competence?
Awareness (aware of own assumptions, values, and beliefs)
Knowledge (attempts to understand the worldview of culturally diverse clients)
Skills (use therapeutic modalities and interventions that are appropriate for culturally different clients)
What are the four categories of acculturation?
Integration (maintains his/her own culture but also incorporates many aspects of the dominant culture)
Assimilation (accepts the majority culture while relinquishing his/her own culture)
Separation (withdraws from the dominant culture and accepts his/her own culture)
Marginalization (does not identify with his/her own culture or with the dominant culture)
As defined by Wrenn, therapists are exhibiting cultural encapsulation when they:
Define everyone’s reality according to their own cultural assumptions and stereotypes
Disregard cultural differences
Ignore evidence that disconfirms their beliefs
Rely on techniques and strategies to solve problems
Disregard their own cultural biases
Emic
Refers to culture-specific theories, concepts, and research strategies. An attempt is made to see things through the eyes of the MEMBERS of that culture
Etic
Refers to phenomena that reflect a universal (culture-general) orientation. Involves viewing people from different cultures as essentially the same
As defined by Hall, _________________ is grounded in the situation, depends on group understanding, relies heavily on nonverbal cues, helps unify a culture, and is slow to change. In contrast, _________________ relies primarily on the explicit, verbal part of a message.
high-context communication; low-context communication
Landrum and Batts address the effects of racial oppression on the mental health of African Americans and propose that the consequences may take several forms:
1) Internalized oppression: can involve acting out against the system, system blaming, total avoidance of whites, and/or denial of the political significance of race
2) Conceptual incarceration: Involves adopting a White worldview and lifestyle
3) Split-self-syndrome: characterized by polarizing oneself into good and bad components, with the bad components representing one’s African American identity
__________________ is a brief manual-based therapy that was originally developed by Klerman and Weissman as a treatment for depression but has since been successfully applied to other disorders including bipolar disorder, bulimia, and substance abuse and dependence.
Interpersonal therapy
From the perspective of interpersonal therapy, maladaptive behavior is related to what?
Problems in social roles and interpersonal relationships that are traceable to a lack of strong attachments early in life
What is the primary goal of interpersonal therapy?
Although IPT recognizes the contributions of early experience, biological predisposition, and personality to depression and other disorders, its focus is on current social relationships and its primary goals are symptom reduction and improved interpersonal functioning.
How are goals achieved in interpersonal therapy?
Symptom reduction is achieved through education about the disorder, instillation of hope, and, when necessary, pharmacotherapy
Interventions used to improve interpersonal functioning target one of more of four primary problem areas- unresolved grief, interpersonal role disputes, role transitions, and interpersonal deficits.
Describe the three stages in interpersonal therapy?
In the initial stage, the therapist conducts an assessment to ascertain the client’s diagnosis, the interpersonal context in which the client’s symptoms occur, and the problem areas that will be the focus of tx
During the middle phase, the therapist uses specific strategies that address the proglem areas, which may include encouragement of affect, communication analysis, and modeling and role-playing to establish new ways of interacting.
In the last few sessions, the therapist reviews the client’s progress and discusses termination and methods of relapse prevention.
How does Jung describe the conscious?
Oriented toward the external worlk, governed by the ego, and represents the individual’s thoughts, ideas, feelings, sensory perceptions, and ememories
How does Jung describe the unconscious?
Made up of the personal unconscious and collective unconscious
What is the personal unconscious, according to Jung?
Contains experiences that were unconsciously perceived or were once conscious but are now repressed or forgotten
What is the collective unconscious, according to Jung?
The repository of latent memory traces that have been passed down from one generation to the next.
What are some of Jung’s archetypes?
Self (which represents a striving for a unity of the different parts of the personality)
Persona (public mask)
Shadow (the dark side of the personality)
Anima or Animus (feminine and masculine aspects of personality)
In contrast to Freud, who emphasized the impact of the first six years of life on personality development, Jung viewed development as continuing throughout the lifespan and was most interested in growth after the mid ____’s.
30
A key concept in Jung’s personality theory is __________, which refers to an integration of the conscious and unconscious aspects of the psyche that leads to the development of a unique identity.
Individuation
What is the primary goal of Jung’s analytical psychotherapy?
To rebridge the gap between the conscious and the personal and collective unconscious.
The Jungian approach reflects an _____ view of human nature and emphasizes the ________ aspects of the client’s personality.
optimistic; healthy
The focus of Jung’s analytic psychotherapy is primarily on the ___________, with information from the past being sought only when it will hep the client understand the ________.
Here and now, present
Who are the main object relations theorists?
Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, Margaret Mahler, and Otto Kernberg
What is the object-relations theory’s view of maladaptive behavior?
It is the result of abnormalities in early object relations; In addition, many object relations theorists believe that, in infancy, there is a natural tendency to split mental representations of the self and others into good and bad, and that inadequate resolution of this splitting is one cause of maladaptive behavior
What is the primary goal of therapy for the objects relations therapist?
To bring maladaptive unconscious relationship dynamics into consciousness so that dysfunctional internalized object representations can be replaced with more appropriate ones.
What are the humanistic psychotherapies?
Person-centered therapy, Gestalt therapy, existential therapy, reality therapy
Rogers’ person-centered therapy is based on what belief?
All people have an innate “self-actualizing”tendency” that serves as the major source of motivation and guides them toward positive, healthy growth.
What is Roger’s personality theory?
The central concept of Roger’s personality theory is the notion of the self; Rogers believed that each person has the ability to become self-actualized but, to do so, the self must remain unified
What is Roger’s view of maladaptive behavior?
The self becomes disorganized as the result of incongruence between self and experience, which can occur when the individual experiences conditions of worth.
What is the primary goal of person-centered therapy?
To help the client achieve congruence between self and experience so that he or she can become a more fully-functioning, self-actualizing person.
In Rogerian therapy, the right environment involves providing which three facilitative conditions?
Unconditional positive regard; Genuineness (congruence); Accurate Empathic Understanding