The Helping Relationship Flashcards
The Helping Myth
Research shows that having a counselor and a client of the same gender and ethnicity does not necessarily produce a better therapeutic relationship. The data are not strong and clearly more research is necessary.
Happiness
Most people overestimate the impact an event will have on their degree of happiness or unhappiness. For example, individuals believe that marriage or winning the lottery will make them happy. The happiness boost for marriage lasts roughly two years, while the increase from winning the lottery will last about six months. In general, people are poor at forecasting affective/emotional reactions.
Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA)
This reveals that therapy reduces mental health expenditures in the community. Unfortunately insurance and managed care firms primarily push medication as a first line of treatment for mental health issues.
Sigmund Freud’s Psychodynamic Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is the theory of personality and a form of psychotherapy. It is a long term form of treatment often lasting three to five years or more. In classical analysis, the patient (the analysand) is seen four of five times per week. This form of therapy is said to be historic since it focuses on the past.
TERMS with this:
Free association: client can say whatever comes to mind in that moment.
Dreams: very important and generally viewed as a process for wish fulfillment. Research does not support the Freudian wish fulfillment notion.
-Unconscious material is examined.
-Freud emphasized ego defense mechanisms: repression (most important) something that is too painful to face is totally forgotten; displacement is taking your anger out on a safe target rather than the source of your anger;
projection is you can’t accept a quality about yourself so you attribute it to others; Reaction formation is you deny an unacceptable unconscious impulse by acting in the opposite manner; Sublimation (career counseling) is you express an unacceptable impulse in a socially acceptable manner; Rationalization is when a person overrates or underrates a reward or outcome; Identification is joining a feared person (such as a gang) to relieve your own anxiety; Suppression or Denial occurs when you purposely do not think of a situation.
-Transference is a key principle. The analysand (client) behaves as if the analyst is a parent of caretaker from the past.
-The discharge of repressed emotions is called ABREACTION OR CATHARSIS.
-According to Freud’s structural theory, the personality has 3 systems: 1. the superego (the moral seat of the mind housing two entities the conscience and the ego ideal), 2. the ego or reality principle that balances the id and the superego, 3. the id which houses the biological forces especially sex and aggression. The Id operates on the pleasure principle striving for immediate gratification and tension reduction.
-Eros is the life instinct and Thanatos is the death instinct.
-Critics charge that Freud used only case studies to test analysis rather than using true scientific experiments.
Carl Jung’s Analytic Psychology
Jung broke away from Freud in 1914 because he felt that Freud overemphasized the role of sexuality. Jung’s approach is psychodynamic.
The unconscious has two parts: a personal unconscious and the collective unconscious (unconscious that one inherits which is common in all individuals). The collective unconscious is composed of archetypes passed down through the ages.
Archetypes include the PERSONA: a social mask the person wears. In terms of gender, Jung cites that the ANIMUS IS THE MASCULINE SIDE OF THE FEMALE AND THE ANIMA IS THE FEMININE SIDE OF THE MALE. Individuals are ANDROGYNOUS - having both male and female characteristics.
THE SELF is symbolized via a mandala or a balance between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious.
Jung created the extroversion/introversion typologies. One is more dominant. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) has its roots in Jung’s work.
Individuation was Jung’s term for becoming a unique human being.
