Theories of Counseling Chapter 4 Flashcards
Psychoanalytic Perspective of Human Nature
- Deterministic.
- Behavior is determined by irrational forces, unconscious motivations, and instinctual drives.
Id
- Untamed drives.
- Largely unconscious
- Ruled by the pleasure principle, which is aimed at reducing tension, avoiding pain, and gaining pleasure
Ego
- Mediate between the id and the reality of dangers posed by the id’s impulses.
- Ruled by the reality principle, does realistic thinking and formulates plans of action for satisfying needs.
- It is the executive that governs, controls, and regulates the personality.
Superego
- Internalized social component, its what the person imagines to be.
- The judicial branch of personality, it includes a person’s moral code.
- It functions to inhibit the id impulses, to persuade the ego to substitute moralistic goals for realistic ones.
Consciousness and the Unconscious are the Key Components in Understanding Behavior
- Dreams, symbolic representations of unconscious needs and conflicts.
- Slips of the tongue
- Posthypnotic suggestions
- Material derived from free-association techniques
- Material derived from projective techniques
- The symbolic content of psychotic symptoms
Psychoanalytic Approach
- Grounded on id psychology, and it holds that instincts and intrapsychic conflicts are the basic factors shaping personality.
- The two goals include:
1. To make the unconscious conscious
2. To strengthen the ego so that the behavior is based more on reality and less on instinctual cravings or irrational guilt.
Reality Anxiety
The fear of danger from the external world, and the level of anxiety is proportionate to the degree of real threat.
Neurotic Anxiety
The fear that the instincts will get out of hand and cause the person to do something for which she or he will be punished.
Moral Anxiety
- The fear of one’s own conscience.
- Feeling of guilt.
Ego Defense Mechanisms
- Help individuals cope with anxiety and prevent the ego from being overwhelmed.
1. They either deny or distort reality
2. They operate on an unconscious level.
Erikson’s Psychosocial Model
- Stages refer to basic psychological and social tasks, which individuals need to master at intervals from infancy through old age.
- Each stage of life we face the task of establishing equilibrium between ourselves and our social world.
- A crises is equivalent to a turning point in life when we have the potential to move forward or to regress.
Contemporary Psychoanalysis
Does not deny the role of intrapsychic conflicts, but emphasizes the striving of the ego for mastery and competence throughout the human life span.
Self Psychology (Kohut)
- Emphasizes how we use interpersonal relationships (self objects) to develop our own sense of self.
- Focuses on the nature of the therapeutic relationship, using empathy as a main tool.
Limitations to Psychoanalysis
- Costly and is perceived as being based on upper and middle class values.
- Problematic for clients from cultures who expect direction from a professional
- Long commitment required to accomplish analytic goals
- Difficult/Costly to train
Ego Psychology
- Assist clients in gaining awareness of their defenses and help them develop better ways of coping with these defenses.
- Looks at both early and later developmental periods
Transference
The client’s unconscious shifting to the analyst of feelings, attitudes that are reactions to significant others in the client’s past.
- Symbolizes unfinished business
- When feelings become conscious and are transferred to the therapists, clients can understand and resolve past unfinished business.
Working-Through Process
- Process consists of dealing with transference.
- Repetitive and elaborate explorations of unconscious material and defenses
Countertransference
- A phenomenon that occurs when there is inappropriate affect.
- When therapists respond in irrational ways, or when they lose their objectivity in a relationship because their own conflicts are triggered.
Psychoanalytic Counselor Role
- Analysts assume an anonymous nonjudgmental stance, “blank-screen”
- They avoid self-disclosure and maintain neutrality
- Pays attention to both what is spoken and what is unspoken, listens for gaps and inconsistencies in the client’s story.
- Teach clients the meaning of these processes (through interpretation) so that they are able to achieve insight
Six Techniques of Psychoanalytic Therapy
- Maintaining the analytic framework
- Free Association
- Interpretation
- Dream Analysis
- Analysis of resistance
- Analysis of transference
Free Association
Clients try to say whatever comes to mid without self-censorship.
Maintaining the Analytic Framework
- Refers to range of procedural and stylistic factors.
- Anonymity, maintaining neutrality and objectivity
Interpretation
- Analyst explanation of behavior that is manifested in dreams, free association, resistances, defenses, and the therapeutic relationship itself.
- Should be presented when the phenomenon to be interpreted is close to conscious awareness.
- Should start from the surface and go only deep as the client is able to go.
Dream Analysis
- Procedure in uncovering unconscious material and giving the client insight into some areas of unresolved problems.
1. Latent content: consists of hidden, symbolic, and unconscious motives, wishes, and fears.
2. Manifest content: the dream as it appears to the dreamer
-The process by which the latent content of a dream is transformed into the less threatening manifest content is called dream work.
Resistance
- Anything that works against the progress of therapy and prevents the client from producing previously unconscious material.
- The client’s reluctance to bring to the surface of awareness unconscious material that has been repressed.
Psychodynamic Therapy
- Simplifying the lengthy process of classical psychoanalysis.
1. Remain alert to transference manifestations
2. Explore the meaning of clients’ dreams
3. Explore both the past and the present
4. Offer interpretations for defenses and resistance and 5. Concerned with unconscious material. - They interpret less frequently and use more supportive interventions.
Termination
- Reasons include:
1. The reduction of transference
2. Striving and childhood fantasies
3. Increased capacity for love and work
4. Achieving more stable coping patterns
Relational Psychoanalysis
- Therapists present meanings associated with a client’s thoughts as a hypothesis rather than a truth.
- Relational Interpretations are collaborative
- Based on the assumption that therapy is an interactive process between client and therapist.
- Client-therapist relationship
Jung’s Perspective
- Believed during midlife we need to let go of many of the old values and confront our unconscious.
- It is essential to accept our dark side, its primitive impulses.
- The capacity of humans to move toward wholeness and self-realization.
Individuation
The harmonious integration of the conscious and unconscious aspects of personality is innate and primary goal.
Collective Unconscious
- The deepest and least accessible level of the psyche
- It contains the accumulation of inherited experiences of human and prehumen species.
Archetypes
- Persona: a mask to protect ourselves.
- Animus/Anima: masculinity and femininity, which coexist in both sexes.
- Shadow: represents the thoughts and feelings, and actions that we tend to disown by projecting them outward.
Mahler’s view that individual begins in a state of psychological fusion with the mother and progresses gradually to separation.
1: Autism
- The infant is presumed to be responding more to states of physiological tension
- The infant is unable to differentiate itself from mom
2. Symbiosis
- The infant has a pronounced dependency on the mother.
3. Separation-Individuation
- The child experiences separation from others yet still turn to them for a sense of comfort.
- The children can begin to relate without being overwhelmed with fears of losing their sense of individuality
Failure to Differentiate
Children who do not experience the opportunity to differentiate, and those who lack the opportunity to idealize others while also taking pride in themselves, may later suffer from narcissistic character disorders and problems of self-esteem.
Object-Relations Theory
- Investigates attachment and separation.
- Emphasize on how our relationships with others are affected by the way we have internalized our experiences of others and set up representations of others within ourselves.
Tried Psychodynamic Therapy
- Work within the framework of time-limited therapy
- Target a specific interpersonal problem and goals during the initial session.
- Assume a less neutral therapeutic stance than traditional approaches.
- Establish a strong working alliance early in the therapy
- Use interpretation relatively early in the therapy relationship
- Emphasis on the here and now and of the client’s life rather than exploring the there and then of childhood.
- Practitioners ask questions, are more direct and confrontive, and deal quickly with transference issues.
Positives of Psychoanalytic Perspective
-Therapists can help their clients review environmental situation at the various critical turning points in their lives to determine how certain events have affected them either positively or negatively.
