Freud

  • Father of psychoanalysis
  • His views continue to influence contemporary practice
  • He experienced a number of severe emotional problems of his own and engaged in selfanalysis

 

Psychodynamic/Psychoanalytic

  • Freud’s psychoanalysis was the original psychodynamic theory, but the psychodynamic approach as a whole includes all theories that were based on his ideasàà Jung, Alder and Erikson
  • Freud’s theories were considered psychoanalytic, whereas the term psychodynamic refers to both his theories and those of his followers.
  • Freud’s psychoanalysis is both a theory and a therapy.

 

View of human nature

  • The Freudian view of human nature is basically deterministicàà our behaviours are determined by irrational forces, unconscious motivations and biological and instinctual drive.
  • Instincts are central to the Freudian approach.
  • Libidoàà originally refers to sexual energy but he later broadened it to include the energy of all the life instincts.
  • These instincts serve the purpose of the survival of the individual and the human raceàà they oriented toward growth, development and creativity
  • Libido should be seen as a source of motivation that encompasses sexual energy but goes beyond it.
  • Freud sees the goal of life as gaining pleasure and avoiding pain.
  • Death instincts: account for the aggressive drive.
  • Freud’s view was that both sexual and aggressive drives are powerful determinants of why people act as they do.

 

Structure of personality

  • Personality consists of three systems: ID, EGO, and SUPEREGO
  • From the orthodox Freudian perspective- humans are viewed as energy systems.
  • The dynamics of personality consist of the ways in which psychic energy is distributed to the ID, EGO, and SUPEREGO.
  • Because the amount of energy is limited, one systems gains control over the available energy at the expense of the other two systemsàà behaviour is determined by this psychic energy.

 

 

 

ID

 • Untamed drives or impulses that might be likened to the biological component
  • Operates by the pleasure principle– aimed at reducing tension, avoiding pain, and gaining pleasure
  • The ID is illogical, amoral, and drive to satisfy instinctual needs.
  • The ID is the original system of personality- at birth a person is all ID
  • It is the primary source of psychic energy and the seat of instincts.
  • It lacks organization and is blind, demanding and insistent.
  • It never matures
  • It is largely unconscious
 

EGO

 • Attempts to organize and mediate between the ID and

 

    dangers posed by the ID’s impulses.
  • Actions of the ego may or may not be conscious
  • Delays immediate gratification 
  • Operates by the reality principle– the EGO does realistic and logical thinking and formulates plans of action for satisfying needs.
  • It controls the blind impulses of the ID
  • The EGO is the executive that regulates the personality.
 

SUPEREGO

 • We can protect ourselves from the dangerous of our own drives by establishing a superego, which is the internalized social component.
  • Operates by the moral principle
  • Judicial: moral code, represents the ideal, strives for perfection.
  • It functions to inhibit the ID impulses and to persuade the ego to substitute moralistic goals for realistic ones, and to strive for perfection.
  • It is the internalization of the standards of parents and society is related to the psychological rewards and punishments (punishment= guilt/inferiority rewards= pride/self-love).

 

Development of personality

  • There are 5 psychosexual stages of development- first three are particularly important.
    • Oral stageàà deals with the inability to trust oneself and others, resulting in the fear of loving and forming close relationships and low self-esteem.
    • Anal stageàà deals with the inability to recognize and express anger, leading to the denial of one’s own power as a person and the lack of a sense of autonomy.
    • Phallic stageàà deals with the inability to fully accept one’s sexuality and sexual feelings and also difficulty in accepting oneself as a man or woman.
    • Latencyàà sexual interests replaced by interests in school, sport etc., relationships with others
    • Genital stageàà phallic stage revived, can deal with sexual energy by putting into forming friendships.
  • Freud proposed three early stages of development that often bring people to counselling when not appropriately resolved.
  • According to the psychoanalytic view, these three areas of development are all grounded in the first 6 years of life.
  • When a child’s needs are not met during these stages, they may become fixated at that stage and behave psychologically immature ways later in life.
  • Erikson built on Freud’s ideas and developed the psychosocial stagesàà the basic psychological and social tasks, which an individual needs to master.
    • This theory holds that psychosexual growth and psychosocial growth take place together.
    • At each stage of life we face the task of establishing equilibrium between our social world and ourselves.
    • Development is divided by specific crises to be resolvedàà a crisis is equivalent to a turning in life when we have the potential to move forward or to regress.
  • Classical psychoanalysis is grounded on ID psychologyàà contemporary psychoanalysis is based on ego psychology.
  • Three little pigs/Cinderella metaphor

 

Psychoanalytic theory

  • It is a model of personality development – It is a subset of psychodynamic theory.
  • It is a model that calls attention to psychodynamic processes that motivate behaviour (such as the role of the unconscious) and developing our understanding of the structure of one’s basic character.
  • Freud was fairly rigid with his theoriesàà he had very little tolerance for colleagues who diverged from his psychoanalytic doctrines
  • Jung and Adler worked closely with Freud but each founded their own therapeutic orientation after repeated conflict with Freudàà they extended Freud’s theories.

 

Conscious and unconscious

  • Conscious: what’s on the surface- we are aware of it (logic and reality)
  • Unconscious: what is below the surface- below our awareness threshold (instincts and drives) o Clinical evidence for postulating the unconscious: dreams, slips of the tongue, posthypnotic suggestions, material derived from free-association and projective techniques, and symbolic content of psychotic symptoms.
  • The aim of psychoanalytic therapy is to make the unconscious motives conscious

 

Anxiety

  • Feeling of dread that results from repressed feelings, memories, desires and experience that emerges to the surface of our awareness
  • Function: warning of impending danger
  • Develops out of conflict between the ID, EGO, and SUPEREGO for control over the psychic energy
  • Reality anxietyàà fear of danger from the external world
  • Neurotic anxietyàà fear that the instincts will get out of hand and cause one to do something they will be punished for. Evoked by threats to the balance of power.
  • Moral anxietyàà fear of one’s own conscious. Evoked by threats to the balance of power. – When ego cannot control anxiety it relies on indirect methodsàà ego-defence behaviour

 

Ego defence mechanisms

  • They are normal behaviours, which operate on an unconscious level and tend to deny or distort reality.
  • They help the individual to cope with anxiety and prevent the ego from being overwhelmed. –   Most common is denial
  • They have an adaptive value only if they do not become a style of life to avoid facing reality. – Examples:  
    • Repression o Denial  o Reaction formation o Projection o Displacement o Rationalization o Sublimation o Regression o Introjection  
    • Identification
    • Compensation

 

Therapeutic process

 

Therapeutic goals

  • Overall aim: to increase adaptive functioning, which involves the reduction of symptoms and the resolution of conflicts.
  • Two goals of psychoanalytical therapy are to make the unconscious conscious and to strengthen the ego so that behaviour is based more on reality and less on instinctual cravings or irrational guilt.
  • Psychoanalytic therapy is oriented toward achieving insight.

 

Therapist’s function and role

  • Analyst typically assumes an anonymous stanceàà sometimes called the black-screen approach.
  • They engage in very little disclosure and maintain a sense of neutrality to foster a transference relationshipàà client makes projections onto them.
  • These projections, which have their origins in unfinished and repressed situations, are considered grist for the mill and their analysis is the very essence of therapeutic work.
  • One of the central functions is to help clients acquire the freedom to love, work and play, achieving self-awareness, honesty, dealing with anxiety, gaining control over impulsive and irrational behaviour etc.
  • They make appropriate interpretationsàà this accelerates the process of uncovering unconscious material
  • Analysts help clients to achieve insight into their problems, increase their awareness of ways to change, and thus gain more control over their lives.

 

Client’s experience in therapy 

  • Client is free to express anything that comes to mind without self-censorship ààThis process is known as the fundamental rule.
  • Clients report their feelings, experiences, memories and fantasies lying on a couchàà encourages deep, uncensored reflections and reduces the stimuli that might interfere also reduces their ability to read their analysts face for reactions.
  • The analyst remains non-judgmental.
  • The client is ready to terminate therapy when… o They and their therapist mutually agree that they have resolved those symptoms and core conflicts
    • Have clarified and accepted their remaining emotional problems o Have understood the historical roots of their problems
    • Have mastery of core themes’
    • Have insight into how their environment affects them and how they affect the environment
    • Achieved reduced defensiveness o Can integrate their awareness of past problems with their present relationships.
  • Curtis and Hirsch suggest that termination tends to bring up intense feelings of attachment, separation and lossàà thus, termination date is set well in advance so feelings can be spoken about.

 

Relationship between therapist and client

  • The classical analyst stands outside the relationship, comments on it, and offers insightproducing interpretations.
  • A significance aspect of the therapeutic relationship is manifested through transference reactions.
  • If therapy is to produce change, the transference relationship must be worked through

 

Techniques

  • Techniques are aimed at increasing awareness, fostering insights, and understanding the meanings of symptoms.

 

Maintaining the analytic framework – The analyst’s relative anonymity, the regularity and consistency of meetings
Analysis of resistance – Analyst helps clients become aware of the reasons for their resistance so that they can deal with them
  – Resistance is anything that works again the progress of therapy and prevents the client from producing previously unconscious material.
Analysis of transference – Therapist uses this technique as a route to
    elucidating the client’s intrapsychic life
  – Transference: client’s unconscious shifting to the analyst feelings and fantasies that are reactions to significant others in the client.
  – Unconscious repetition of the past in the present.
  – It allows clients to achieve here-and-now insight into the influence of the past on their present functioning.
  – Allows them to work through old conflicts that are keeping them fixated and retarding their emotional growth.
  – Counter-transference: therapist’s reactions to the client- can project distortions onto the client.
  – Guidelines for working effectively with countertransference:

o   Manage their countertransference in a way that is beneficial.

o   Gain self-understanding and establish appropriate boundaries with clients. o Personal therapy and clinical supervision for therapists can be most helpful in better understanding how their internal reactions influence the therapy process.
Free association – Client reports immediately without censoring any feelings or thoughts
Interpretation – Therapist points out, explains and teaches the meanings of whatever is revealed
Dream analysis – Therapist uses the ‘royal road to the unconscious’ to bring unconscious material to light.
  – During sleep, defences are lowered and repressed feelings surface.
  – Dreams have two levels of content: latent content and manifest content.
  – Latent content: consists of hidden, symbolic and unconscious motives, wishes and fears.
  – Manifest content: the dream as it appears to the dreamer (latent content is so painful they are transformed into the more acceptable manifest content)

 

Group counselling

  • Group work provides a rich framework for working through transference feelings
  • The group becomes a microcosm of members’ everyday lives
  • Projections onto the leader and members are valuable clues to unresolved conflicts within the person that can be identified and worked through in the group.

 

Carl Jung

  • A Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded Analytical Psychology.
  • Trained Jungian Therapists are called Analytical Psychologists.
  • He proposed and developed the concepts of extraversion and introversion; archetypes and the collective unconscious, which are the unconscious aspects we share with others (archetypes are an example of this).

 

Jung’s analytic psychology:

  • Interested in personal and collective unconscious
  • Places central importance on psychological changes associated with midlife.
  • Achieving individuation– the harmonious integration of the conscious and unconscious aspects of personality- is an innate and primary goal
  • To become integrated, it is essential to accept our dark side, or shadow.
  • Dreams are aimed at integration and resolution; they contain messages from deepest layer of the unconscious, the collective unconscious- the source of creativity
  • Collective unconscious: contains the accumulation of inherited experiences of human and prehumen species
  • Contents of collective unconscious (images of universal experiences) = archetypes
  • The most important archetypes: the persona, the anima and animus and the shadow. o Persona– a mask, or public face, that we wear to protect ourselves o The animus and the anima represent both the biological and psychological aspects of masculinity and femininity- coexist in both sexes.
    • Shadow- has the deepest roots and most dangerous of the archetypes. Represents our dark sight, thoughts, feelings and actions we tend to disown. – Principle of entantiodromia: tension of opposites

 

Jung and dream analysis

  • Dream analysis: dreams are an attempt to express, rather than an attempt to repress and disguise, they contain messages from the collective unconscious.
  • Jung believed dreams serve a prospective function- symbolic of what’s needed for further growth/balance- and a compensatory function- working to bring about a balance between opposites
  • Techniques: o Synchronicity: A meaningful coincidence of 2 or more events, where something other than probability of chance is involved.
    • Active imagination: a conscious dialogue with unconscious material o Amplification: make louder until meaning resonates or clicks- personal amplification, cultural amplification, and archetypal amplification.

 

Contemporary Psychodynamic Therapy

  • Neo-Freudian school moved away from the orthodox position and incorporated cultural and social influences on personality.
  • Object Relationsàà how you react to others o Emphasizes interpersonal relationships as these are represented intra-psychically and as they influence our interactions with people.
    • Central influence on this theory is Margaret Mahleràà her believe that individual begins in a state of psychological fusion with the mother and progresses gradually to separation.
    • Normal infantile autism- first ¾ weeks, infant is unable to differentiate itself from its mother in many respects at this stage.
    • Symbiosis- 3- 8 months of age, infant has a pronounced dependency on the mother o Separation individuation- begins in the 4th or 5th month, child moves away from the symbiotic forms of relating, the child experiences separation, may demonstrate ambivalence, torn between enjoying separate stages of independence and dependence.
    • The final sub phase involves a move toward constancy of self and object- pronounced by the 36th
    • Borderline and narcissistic disorders appear to be rooted in traumas and disturbances during the separation-individuation phase.
  • Self Psychology o Emphasizes how we use interpersonal relationships (self objects to develop our own sense of self)
  • Relational psychoanalysis o Emphasis the interactive process between client and therapist
  • Brief Psychodynamic therapy o Applies the principles of psychodynamic theory and therapy to treating selective disorders within 10-25 sessions.
    • Borderline personality disorder responds well to this due to the containment
  • Ego psychology is part of classical psychoanalysis with the emphasis placed on the vocabulary of ID, EGO, and SUPEREGO and on the defence mechanisms.

 

Contributions of classical analysis –      Helps analysts understand:

  • Human behaviour from a psychosexual perspective.
  • Unfinished business can be worked through to provide a new ending to events that have restricted clients emotionally.
  • The value of concepts such as unconscious motivation, the influence of early development, transference, countertransference and resistance.
  • How the overuse of ego defences keep clients from functioning effectively

 

Multicultural perspective –     Strengths:

  • Techniques can be modified to suit the setting, can help client to review environmental settings
  • Analysts aware of their own biases
  • Erikson’s psychosocial approach has particular application to people of colour – Limitations:
  • Based on upper/middle class values o Ambiguity- some cultures like a direct approach
  • Doesn’t adequately address social, cultural, and political factors
  • Not good for low SES- too long, doesn’t deal with immediate pressing issues

 

Limitations of classical analysis

  • May not be appropriate for all cultures or socioeconomic groups
  • Deterministic focus does not emphasize current maladaptive behaviours
  • Minimizes role of the environment
  • Requires subjective interpretation by the analyst
  • Relies heavily client fantasy
  • Not all clients are suited to psycho-analytic therapy- requires a reasonable degree of selfinsight
  • Lengthy treatment- often 7-10 years of weekly sessions may not be practical or affordable for many people