LOQ: How do psychotherapy and the biomedical therapies differ?
Modern therapies can be classified into two categories
Some therapists combine techniques called eclectic which uses a combination of both of the therapies
Psychotherapy Treatment: involving psychological techniques; consists of interactions between a trained therapist and someone seeking to overcome psychological difficulties or achieve personal growth.
Biomedical Therapy: prescribed medications or procedures that act directly on the person’s physiology.
Eclectic Approach: an approach to psychotherapy that uses techniques from various forms of therapy.
LOQ: What are the goals and techniques of psychoanalysis, and how have they been adapted in psychodynamic therapy?
The first major psychological therapy was Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis
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.
The Goals of Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis was Freud’s method of helping people to bring these repressed feelings into conscious awareness
The Techniques of Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalytic theory emphasizes the power of childhood experiences to mold the adult
To the analyst, these mental blocks indicate resistance
Over many such sessions, your relationship patterns surface in your interaction with your therapist and you might experience strong positive or negative feelings towards your analyst
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).
Psychodynamic Therapy
Psychodynamic therapists don’t talk much about id-ego-superego conflicts but they do try to help people understand their current symptoms
Psychodynamic therapists aim to help people gain insight into unconscious dynamics that arise from their life experience.
Psychodynamic Therapy: therapy deriving from the psychoanalytic tradition; views individuals as responding to unconscious forces and childhood experiences, and seeks to enhance self-insight.
LOQ: What are the basic themes of humanistic therapy? What are the specific goals and techniques of Rogers’ client-centered approach?
The humanistic perspective emphasizes people’s innate potential for self-fulfillment
Humanistic therapies differ from psychodynamic therapies in many other ways:
Carl Rogers developed client-centered therapy
To Rogers, “hearing” was active listening
Rogers hinted at three ways to improve communication
Insight Therapies: therapies that aim to improve psychological functioning by increasing a person’s awareness of underlying motives and defenses.
Client-Centered Therapy: a humanistic therapy, developed by Carl Rogers, in which the therapist uses techniques such as active listening within an accepting, genuine, empathic environment to facilitate clients’ growth. (Also called person-centered therapy.)
Active Listening: empathic listening in which the listener echoes, restates, and clarifies. A feature of Rogers’ client-centered therapy.
Unconditional Positive Regard: a caring, accepting, nonjudgmental attitude, which Carl Rogers believed would help clients develop self-awareness and self acceptance.
LOQ: How does the basic assumption of behavior therapy differ from the assumptions of psychodynamic and humanistic therapies? What techniques are used in exposure therapies and aversive conditioning?
Behavior therapies doubt the healing power of self-awareness and assume that problem behaviors are the problems.
Behavior Therapy: therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors.
Classical Conditioning Techniques
Counterconditioning, such as with exposure therapy, pairs the trigger stimulus with a new response that is incompatible with fear
Counterconditioning: behavior therapy procedures that use classical conditioning to evoke new responses to stimuli that are triggering unwanted behaviors; include exposure therapies and aversive conditioning.
Exposure Therapies
Joseph Wolpe refined Mary Cover Jones counterconditioning technique into the exposure therapies used today to try and change people’s reactions by repeatedly exposing them to stimuli that trigger unwanted reactions
One exposure therapy that is used to treat phobias is systematic desensitization
Another type is virtual reality exposure therapy
Exposure Therapies: behavioral techniques, such as systematic desensitization and virtual reality exposure therapy, that treat anxieties by exposing people (in imaginary or actual situations) to the things they fear and avoid.
Systematic Desensitization: a type of exposure therapy that associates a pleasant relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli. Commonly used to treat phobias.
Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy: a counterconditioning technique that treats anxiety through creative electronic simulations in which people can safely face their greatest fears, such as airplane flying, spiders, or public speaking
Aversive Conditioning
Aversive conditioning creates a negative (aversive) response to a harmful stimulus (such as alcohol).
Aversive Conditioning: associates an unpleasant state (such as nausea) with an unwanted behavior (such as drinking alcohol).
LOQ: What is the main premise of therapy based on operant conditioning principles, and what are the views of its proponents and critics?
Rewards used to modify behavior vary
Behavior modification critics have two concerns:
Token Economy: an operant conditioning procedure in which people earn a token for exhibiting a desired behavior and can later exchange the tokens for privileges or treats.
LOQ: What are the goals and techniques of the cognitive therapies and of cognitive-behavioral therapy?
The cognitive therapies assume that our thinking colors our feelings
Cognitive Therapy: therapy that teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking; based on the assumption that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions.
Beck’s Therapy for Depression
Beck found that depressed people often reported dreams with negative themes of loss, rejection, and abandonment
Therefore, getting people to change what they say to themselves is an effective way to change their thinking
To change such negative self-talk, therapists have offered stress inoculation training:
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy
Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) takes a combined approach to depression and other disorders.
Dialectical-behavioral therapy (DBT) helps change helps change harmful and even suicidal behavior patterns
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT): a popular integrative therapy that combines cognitive therapy (changing self-defeating thinking) with behavior therapy (changing behavior).
LOQ: What are the aims and benefits of group and family therapies?
Group Therapy
Group therapy doesn’t provide the same degree of therapist involvement with each client, but does offers other benefits:
Group Therapy: therapy conducted with groups rather than individuals, providing benefits from group interaction.
Family Therapy
Family therapists tend to view families as systems, in which each person’s actions trigger reactions from others
Family Therapy: therapy that treats people in the context of their family system. Views an individual’s unwanted behaviors as influenced by, or directed at, other family members
Self-Help Groups
The popularity of support groups—for the addicted, the bereaved, the divorced, or simply those seeking fellowship and growth—may reflect a longing for community and connectedness.
LOQ: Does psychotherapy work? How can we know?
Clients’ Perceptions
If clients’ testimonials were the only measuring stick, we could strongly affirm psychotherapy’s effectiveness, but we should not dismiss these testimonials. Some critics note several things such as
Clinicians’ Perceptions
If clinicians’ perceptions were proof of therapy’s effectiveness, we would have even more reason to celebrate
Outcome Research
In the twentieth century, psychology, faced a challenge with all of the different types of therapies
A glimpse of psychotherapy’s overall effectiveness can then be provided by means of a meta-analysis