Lecture 3: psycho-analytic theory

Question 1

criticism on psychoanalysis (7)

Answer 1

1. old fashioned
2. unscientific (theory is so rich that it can explain any kind of behaviour)
3. difficult and confusing, slow and efficient
4. dangerous (involves exploring things that can be experienced as unpleasant, which can and will often cause anxiety)
5. more questions than answers (especially in the beginning)
6. ethical doubts (unscientific, possible danger, confusion)
7. no psyche (some critique that there is no such thing as a psyche or a mind)

Question 2

Psychoanalysis allows us to go beyond what is well-known, familiar, and self-evident: it can provide things that might be lacking in academic psychology:

Answer 2

• unconscious
• full experiences (it provides a place to explore one’s desires, fantasies, dreams, odd ideas etc. and seeks sense in the ‘nonsense’ and nonsense in the ‘sense’. In short, it takes the full human experience serious instead of censoring out the parts that we do not understand.)
• rich theory we could use to investigate things we would miss with the clinical tradition
• therapeutic skills (its concepts can be very useful for improving therapeutic skills

Question 3

verschil therapie en analyse =

Answer 3

• Therapy: attempts to attain therapeutic goals (function better, have less symptoms) by speaking.
• Analysis: aims to create an atmosphere where the unconscious can be brought to speak and be listened to without other aims than that. The analysand (patient in therapy) can decide him/herself at some moment that the analysis is enough and can be terminated, and the outcome is unique, unpredictable and may or may not overlap with social expectations.

Question 4

client-centered therapy=

Answer 4

a therapy approach that starts from the idea that clients are sovereign human beings who can and should be the architects of their own lives. Clients have self-authority as active agents of personal and social change, and an actualizing tendency. Client-centered therapy is essentially a way of helping in which the therapist facilitates a process directed by the client.

Question 5

actualizing tendency =

Answer 5

an organism’s motivation to maintain and enhance themselves. Rogers proposed that the actualizing tendency is constantly functioning but may be distorted by environmental factors: we are doing the best we can under the circumstances we perceive and that are acting on us.

This tendency is the basis of client-centered therapy. It starts from the assumption that individuals prefer to be healthy rather than sick and do not need the therapist to direct them to this preference: the therapist trusts in the client’s self-righting and self-regulatory capacities.

Question 6

medical model =

Answer 6

an approach to psychology that emphasizes applying appropriate treatments to disorders, placing pathology inside the person. Most client-centered approaches are radically different from this medical approach, stating that it can lead to stigmatization and marginalization of the person.