Introduction to psychodynamic Flashcards
What does the psychodynamic approach suggest about early experiences?
Through our earliest experiences, we learn certain templates or scripts about how the world works. We learn, for example, what to expect of others, how to
behave in relationships, how to elicit caring and attention, s to love, and on and on.
We continue to apply these templates or scripts to new situations as we proceed through life, often when they no longer apply. We view the present through the lens of past experience—and therefore tend to repeat and recreate aspects of the past.
What’s the role of conflict in psychodynamic theory/thinking?
The terms ambivalence and conflict refer to inner contradiction. Conflict in this context refers not to opposition between people, but to contradiction or dissonance within our own minds. We may seek to resolve contradiction by disavowing one or another aspect of our feelings— that is, excluding it from conscious awareness—but the disavowed feelings have a way of “leaking out” all the same.
What’s the Schopenhauer story on how inner conflict could lead to one working at cross purposes in their life?
Deborah Luepnitz (2002) has written a moving book on psychoanalytic therapy emphasizing just this dilemma, titled Schopenhauer’s Porcupines. The title refers to a story told by Schopenhauer about porcupines trying to keep warm on a cold night. Seeking warmth, they huddle together, but when they do they prick each other with their quills. They are forced to move apart but soon find themselves cold and needing warmth. They draw together again, prick each other again, and the cycle begins anew.2
What does the term transference refer to?
The term transference refers specifically to the activation of preexisting expectations, templates, scripts, fears, and desires in the context of the therapy relationship, with the patient viewing the therapist through
the lenses of early important relationships.
What are the findings of therapists utilising counter transference?
that the most effective therapists are those who recognize transference and utilize it therapeutically, regardless of the kind of therapy they think they are practicing. Enrico Jones and his colleagues (Ablon & Jones, 1998; Jones & Pulos, 1993)
This was true even for therapists providing manualized cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), which did not officially acknowledge transference as a mechanism of change.
Why is therapy particularly ripe for counter transference?
It is an ongoing relationship between a person who may be in desperate need and a person who is there to help.
The situation inherently stirs up powerful longings and dependency. In fact, the therapy situation psychologically recapitulates our relationships with our earliest caregivers and therefore exerts an especially
regressive pull. The therapist becomes a magnet for unresolved desires and fears. Therapy can evoke all of the untamed feelings we once experienced toward our early caregivers, including expectations of omnipotence, powerful yearnings, love, and hate.
What is meant my defence is psychodynamic theory?
Anything a person does that serves to distract their attention from something unsettling or dissonant can be said to serve a defensive function. Defense is as simple as not noticing something, not thinking about something, not putting two and two together, or simply distracting ourselves with something else.
How is the concept of homeostasis relevant in the mental life of people?
When something is sufficiently dissonant with our habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and perceiving that it would disrupt psychological equilibrium, we tend to avoid, deny, disregard, minimize, or otherwise disavow it.
What did the research show about therapists that notice defences in clients?
The same research found that the most effective therapists also help patients recognize defenses by calling
attention to them as they arise in treatment. Both types of interventions are empirically linked to good treatment outcome.
What is Shedler’s (2022) core competencies of a good therapist?
a degree of intelligence, a degree of professional knowledge and skill, a capacity for empathic attunement with another person, a willingness to immerse ourselves
in another person’s private, subjective world, an absolutely ruthless willingness to examine ourselves, and for want of a better word, humanity.
What are the major schools of psychoanalysis?
-(Contemporary) Freudians
-Kleinians (Extreme states of mind)
-Independents
-ntersubjective / Relational
-Lacanian
-Jungian
What are the shared assumptions between psychoanalytic schools?
A shared belief that unconscious phenomena exist
A practice that is geared to understanding those phenomena and exploring what happens to them in the context of the live encounter between analyst and patient
What is the essential developmental idea for children managing relational triangles?
a child who starts to realise that they are on the outside of another relationship to something/ someone else in their primary caregiver’s mind.
What is the Eros?
What is the Thanatos?
Life Drive (Eros) aimed at survival and self-propagation
Death Drive (Thanatos): instinctive attraction towards death (a state in which all tension is dissipated)
What are the essential elements of classical freudian clinical practice?
Focuses on the nature and consequences of conflicts resulting from sexual and aggressive wishes originating in childhood
Pleasure-seeking sexual and aggressive wishes of early childhood are associated with parental punishment, which generates conflict and unpleasure (i.e. anxiety, depression etc.)
Psychopathology is understood to be the result of conflict between impulse and defence and the resultant compromise formations
