Psychodynamic psychotherapies Flashcards
What is Freud’s Personality Theory(Id, Ego, Superego)?
Personality theory consists of 2 separate but interrelated theories: a structural (drive) theory and a developmental theory.
Structural theory: id, ego, superego. Id is 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 pleasure principle and seeks immediate gratification of its instinctual drives and needs in order to avoid tension.
The 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 to 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.The primary task of the ego is to mediate the often conflicting demands of the id and reality and once it has developed the superego.
Finally, the superego, emerges when a child is between 4 or 5, 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. 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 5 predetermined psychosexual stages of development–oral,anal,phallic,latency,and genital. During each stage, the id’s libido(sexual energy) is centered on a different body part and as a result over- or undergratification of a person’s sexual needs during each stage is associated with a different personality outcome. EX: oral stage-excessive frustration of the id’s needs at this stage can lead to development of an oral-dependent personality.
What are Freud’s Defense Mechanisms?
Anxiety is an essential component of Freud’s personality theory. Freud described anxiety as an unpleasant feeling linked with excitement of the autonomic nervous system and proposed that its function is to alert the ego to an impending internal and external threat i.e., danger arising from a conflict between the id’s impulses and the demands of the superego or reality or from an actual threat in the external environment.When the ego is unable to ward off danger through rational, realistic means, it may resort to one of its defense mechanisms, which share 2 characteristics:
They operate on an unconscious level and they serve to deny or distort reality.
1.Most basic defense mechanism is REPRESSION, which underlies all other defense mechanisms and occurs when the id’s drives and needs are excluded from conscious awareness by maintaining then in the unconcious.
2.Reaction Formation, involves avoiding an anxiety-evoking impulse by expressing its opposite
3.Projection, occurs when a threatening impulse is attributed to another person or other external source.
While defense mechanisms can be considered adaptive because they serve to reduce anxiety, they may lead to dysfunctional behavior when they become the ego’s habitual way of dealing with danger.
What is Freudian View of Maladaptive Behavior?
For Freudians, psychopathology stems from an unconscious, unresolved conflict that occurred during childhood. Ex: phobias are the result of displacement of anxiety onto an object or event that is symbolic of the object or event involved in an unresolved conflict.
Depression is due to object loss coupled with anger toward the object turned inward
Mania represents a defense against libidinal or aggressive urges that threaten to overwhelm the ego.
What are the therapy goals and techniques of psychoanalysis?
The goal is to reduce or eliminate pathological sxs by bringing the unconscious into conscious awareness and integrating previously repressed material into the personality.
The primary technique is Analysis. Targets of analysis are client’s free associations, dreams, resistances, and transferences. These all consist of a combination of confrontation(making statements that help client see his/her behavior in a new way), clarification(involves clarifying client’s feelings and restating his/her remarks in clearer terms), interpretation(explicitly connecting current behavior to unconscious processes;less likely to elicit anxiety and resistance and are more effective when address motives and conflicts close to client’s consciousness than when material buried deep in unconscious), and working through. Catharsis is the emotional release resulting from the recall of unconscious material and paves the way to client’s insight into the relationship between his/her unconscious processes and current behaviors. Working through is the final stage in psychoanalysis, allows the client to gradually assimilate new insights into his/her personality.
What is Adler’s Individual Psychology Personality Theory(Style of Life)?
The specific ways a person chooses to compensate for inferiority and achieve superiority determine his/her Style of Life, which unifies the various aspects of the personality.
Healthy Style of Life: marked by goals that reflects optimism, confidence, and concern about the welfare of others
Unhealthy(Mistaken) Style of Life: characterized by goals reflecting self-centeredness, competitiveness, and striving for personal power.
A person’s style of life is affected by his or her early experiences, especially within context of the Family, and well established by age 4 or 5. Of importance is whether a child was pampered or neglected.Pampered children do not develop social feelings, while neglected children are dominated by a need for revenge.
What is Adler’s Individual Psychology View of Maladaptive Behavior?
Mental disorders represent mistaken style of life, which is characterized by attempts to compensate for feelings of inferiority, a preoccupation with achieving personal power, and a lack of social interest.
What are the therapy goals and techniques of Adler’s Individual Psychology?
Adler agreed that behavior is purposeful, he adopted a teleological approach that regards behavior as being largely motivated by a person’s future goals rather than determined by past events.
Adlerian psychotherapy entails establishing a collaborative relationship with the client, helping the client identify and understand his/her style of life and its consequences, and reorienting the client’s beliefs and goals so that they support a more adaptive lifestyle.
To identify the nature of a client’s style of life, Adlerians use “lifestyle investigation” which yields information about the client’s family constellation, fictional(hidden) goals, and “basic mistakes” (distorted beliefs and attitudes).
What is Jung’s Analytical Psychotherapy Personality Theory?
Jung defined libido as general psychic energy. He also believed that behavior is determined not only by past events but also by future goals and aspirations.
Personality is the consequence of both conscious and unconscious factors. Conscious is oriented toward the external world, governed by the ego, represents individual’s thoughts, feelings, ideas, sensory perceptions, and memories. The personal unconscious contains experiences that were once unconsciously perceived or were once conscious but are now repressed or forgotten.
Collective Unconscious is the repository of latent memory traces that have been passed down from one generation to the next.Included in the collective unconscious are archetypes.
Archetypes are “primordial images” that cause people to experience and understand certain phenomena in a universal way. Archetypes of particular importance to personality development include the self,which represents a striving for a unity of the different parts of the personality;the persona, or public mask;the shadow, which is the “dark side” of the personality; and the anima and animus which are the feminine and masculine as pects of personality. Jung described personality consisting of 2 attitudes: extraversion and intraversion and 4 basic psychological functions: thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting. Although all 4 functions operate on the unconscious of all people, one function predominates in consciousness.
Individuation-refers to an integration of the conscious and unconscious aspects of the psyche that leads to the development of a unique identity. An important outcome of individuation is the development of wisdom, which occurs in the later years when a person’s interest turn spiritual and philosophical issues.
What is Jung’s Analytical Psychotherapy Personality Theory view of Maladaptive Behavior?
Jungian perspective, Sxs are “unconscious messages to the individual that something is awry with him[…and that present] him with a task that demands to be fulfilled”
What is Jung’s Analytical Psychotherapy Personality Theory therapy goals and techniques?
The primary goal of Jung’s analytical psychotherapy is to rebridge the gap between the conscious and the personal and collective unconscious. to achieve this goal, Jungians rely primarily on interpretations that are designed to help the client become aware of his/her inner world. Because material in the collective unconscious is often expressed symbolically, Jungians are interested in dreams, and the interpretations of dreams(dreamwork) is a key component of therapy. For Jungians dreams represent an unconscious message to the individual that is revealed in a symbolic form.
Jungians are also interested in Client’s Transferences and consider transference to be a projection of the personal and collective unconscious and the analysis of transference to be crucial part of therapy. They also regard the therapist’s countertransference as a useful tool that can provide the therapist with information about what is occurring during the course of therapy. The focus is on the here and now with information from the past being sought only when it will help the client understand the present.
What is Object Relations Personality Theory(Mahler)?
Margaret Mahler focuses on the processes by which an infant assumes his/her own physical and psychological identity and her model of early development involves several phases and subphases.
The actual development of object relations occurs during the Separation-individuation phase, which begins at 4 or 5 months of age and is composed of 4 overlapping subphases: differentiation, practicing, reapproachment, and object constancy. During these subphases the child takes first steps toward separation through sensory exploration of the environment and then, as his/her locomotor skills improve, by actual physical exploration. This is followed by a period of conflict between independence and dependence, which is manifested by separation anxiety. By about 3 yrs of age, the child has developed a permanent sense of self and object(“object constancy”) and is able to perceive others as both separate and related.
What is Object Relations Personality Theory view of maladaptive behavior?
For object-relations theorists, maladaptive behavior is the result of abnormalities in early object relations. Mahler, traces adult psychopathology to problems that occurred during separation-individuation. Many 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. According to Kernberg, as a result of adverse childhood experiences, and individual with Borderline Personality Disorder never integrated the positive and negative aspects of his/her experiences with others and as a result continues to shift back and forth between contradictory images –i.e., from overidealizing others to devaluating them.
What is Object Relations Personality Theory’s therapy goals and techniques?
Object-relations theorists view psychotherapy as an opportunity to provide the client with support, acceptance, and other conditions that restore the client’s ability to relate to others in meaningful, realistic ways. A primary goal of therapy is to bring “maladaptive unconscious relationship dynamics into consciousness” so that dysfunctional internalized object representations can be replaced with more appropriate ones. A primary focus is on splitting, projective identification, and other defense mechanisms that serve to maintain pathological object relations.
