Therapy Flashcards
Psychotherapy
An emotionally charged, confiding interaction between a trained therapist and someone who suffers from psychological difficulties.
Biomedical Therapy
Prescribed medications or medical procedures that act directly on the patient’s nervous system.
Eclectic Approach
An approach to psychotherapy that, depending on the client’s problems, uses techniques from various forms of therapy.
Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud’s therapeutic technique. Freud believed the patient’s free associations, resistances, dreams, and transferences- and the therapist’s interpretations of them-released previously repressed feelings, allowing the patient to gain self-insight.
Resistance
In psychoanalysis, the blocking from consciousness of anxiety-laden material.
Interpretation
In psychoanalysis, the analyst’s noting supposed dream meanings, resistances, and other significant behaviors and events in order to promote insight.
Transference
In psychoanalysis, the patient’s transfer to the analyst of emotions linked with other relationships (such as love or hatred for a parent).
Client-Centered Therapy
A humanistic therapy, developed by Carl Rogers, in which the therapist uses techniques such as active listening within a genuine, accepting, empathetic environment to facilitate clients’ growth (also called person-centered therapy).
Active Listening
Empathetic listening in which the listener echoes, restates, and clarifies. A feature of Rogers’ client-centered therapy.
Behavior Therapy
Therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors.
Counterconditioning
A behavior therapy procedure that conditions new responses to stimuli that trigger unwanted behaviors; based on classical conditioning. Includes exposure therapy and aversive conditioning.
Exposure Therapies
Behavioral techniques, such as systematic desensitization, that treat anxieties by exposing people (in imagination or actuality) to the things they fear and avoid.
Systematic Desensitization
A type of counterconditioning that associates a pleasant relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli. Commonly used to treat phobias.
Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy
An anxiety treatment that progressively exposes people to simulations of their greatest fears, such as airplanes flying, siders, or public speaking.
Aversive Conditioning
A type of counterconditioning that associates an unpleasant state (such as nausea) with an unwanted behavior (such as drinking alcohol).
