Psychodynamic - Therapy Flashcards
What is the therapy in the psychodynamic approach and how does each assumption link to the therapy?
Dream Therapy
Childhood experiences: any traumatic event that has occurred during early childhood may have been repressed and appear instead in the form of dreams. To uncover such repressed memories the therapist would offer interpretations of the dream in the context of the client’s life.
Unconscious mind: the main aim of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious, so that people become aware of unconscious influences.
Tripartite personality: Freud believed when a person is dreaming, the ego becomes suppressed and the ID is given free rein and dreams may represent unconscious motives, wishes and desires that would be socially unacceptable in the waking world.
What did Freud claim that dreams were?
Freud believed that all dreams were unconscious fulfilment of wishes that could not be satisfied in the conscious mind.
Dreams therefore protect the sleeper (primary-process-thought) but also allow some expression to these buried urges
Describe the two stages of dream therapy
(common sense)
Step 1: The dreamer recalls their dream to the therapist. What the dreamer remembers (the story of the dream) is referred to as the manifest content.
Step 2: The process of ‘dreamwork’ is applied to attempt to understand the dream. Dreamwork is when the therapist attempts to decode ‘the meaning’ of the dream.
What is the role of the therapist in dream therapy
The role of the therapist is to reverse the dreamwork process to uncover the underlying meaning of the dream,
e.g decoding the manifest content back to the latent content.
It is important that the therapist considers the context of the client’s life when offering interpretations and more than one interpretation should be offered allowing the client to select the one that makes the most sense to them.
What are the 5 processes of ‘dreamworks’
- Condensation: this is the idea that complex ideas are represented or condensed into simply an image of the dream.
- Displacement: Freud noted that significant meanings of the dream are represented as seemingly insignificant features of our dream. This means that what the dream seems to be about is very different to the meaning.
- Representation: this is the idea that an abstract thought is represented by a visual image. When we describe our dreams, we use words to describe the images.
- Symbolism: any significant features of the dream may be replaced by a symbol, for example, a sword representing a penis.
- Secondary elaboration: this process occurs by the patient’s unconscious collecting all the images within the dream and fitting them together to make sense of the dream to try and give it a logical story but by doing this, it further disguises the meaning
Define Manifest and Latent Content
Manifest content: Story of the dream aka what the person remembers
Latent content: Underlying meaning of the dream.
Give the evaluative points for dream therapy
Effectiveness
strength: Research support (Matt and navarno and solms)
weakness: Research support (Hobson and Mccarley)
Methodological
Weakness: lacks ecological validity
Ethics:
strength: Valid consent
weakness:
power imbalance,
risk of psychological harm
false memory disorder.
Advantage of the effectiveness of dream therapy with CA
Research evidence to support in Matt and Navarro (1997) in a review of 63 meta-analysis on the effect of psychotherapy found, on average, 75% of clients receiving dream analysis showed improvements.
These studies illustrate the benefits of dream analysis on uncovering the root cause of the disorders.
Additionally, Solms used PET scans to investigate brain activity during dreaming and did indeed find that the rational parts of the brain are inactive during REM sleep whereas the brain areas related to memory are very active. Supporting Freuds idea of the ID reigning free during dreams.
However, psychotherapy using dream analysis is less common than other forms of psychotherapy such as talking therapy and hypnosis meaning there is limited scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of dream analysis.
Name a disadvantage of the effectiveness of Dream Therapy
Hobson and McCarley (1997) argue that dreams are nothing but commands sent from the brain and are simply a form of ‘thinking that happens while we sleep’.
This questions Freud’s suggestion that dreams fulfil unconscious wishes and desires. As dream analysis cannot be scientifically validated, it is difficult to support Freud’s idea of wish fulfilment in dream with any other research.
Give one methodological issue with Dream therapy
Much of the research into dreaming is conducted in sleep laboratories (e.g solms et al) this puts under question if this sleep / dream state is as authentic as regular sleep conditions at home, as the patient is wired up with various electrodes taking measurements. Suggesting evidence to support dream therapy lacks ecological validity
Name a disadvantage of the ethics of Dream therapy to do with BPS guidlines
1) There is a risk of stress, anxiety, humiliation, or pain to the participants during dream analysis. The therapist may guide the client towards an interpretation of the dream that is emotionally distressing as it may bring uncover past traumatic events.
Name a disadvantage of the ethics of Dream therapy to do with false memories
2) Dream Therapy could also trigger false memories.
This means Dream Therapy needs to be handled carefully during the therapy to ensure that the participant is protected during and after the therapy and be informed of their right to withdraw if the therapy becomes too distressing.
The therapist should make the patient aware of false memory syndrome and the interpretations of the dream should be within the context of the client’s life with multiple interpretations offered.
Name a disadvantage of the ethics of Dream therapy to do with power imbalance
3) There is a risk of power imbalance between the therapist and client and the therapist needs to manage this carefully to ensure an over-reliance doesn’t occur
Give one advantage of the ethics of dream therapy
Valid consent can be used to improve the ethics of dream therapy
Valid consent is where the participant is run down on how DT works and the possible effects of it beforehand. This is an important ethical issue to consider within dream analysis as it potentially will uncover emotionally distressing memories and the client should understand what is involved in the therapy before committing. The therapist should make sure the client understands what they are consenting to and if they feel distressed, they should be able to stop it at any point.
How could you conclude an evaluation on dream therapy
To conclude, dream analysis can be effective in treating depression and anxiety disorders where the root cause of the problem can be traced back to early childhood experiences.as seen in Mat and Navarro
It is one of the only therapies that adresses the underlying cause of the problem. Although it is a lengthy process, which can sometimes span several years, it can have significant long-term benefit.
However, dream therapy can become unethical if done incorrectly, so care should be given to protect clients from any psychological harm that they may experience during the therapy and the therapist should be careful to balance the power imbalance to avoid an over-reliance on the therapist.
