The term ‘psychodynamic’ refers to the transfer of
psychic or mental energy between the different structures and levels of
consciousness within peoples minds. Psychodynamic approaches emphasize the
importance of unconscious influences on how people function. Therapy aims to
increase clients’ abilities to exercise greater conscious control over their
lives. Analysis or interpretation of dreams can be a central part of therapy.
The humanistic school is based on humanism, a system of
values and beliefs that emphasizes the better qualities of humankind and
people’s abilities to develop their human potential. Humanistic therapists
emphasize enhancing clients’ abilities to experience their feelings and think
and act in harmony with their underlying tendencies to actualize themselves as
unique individuals. Existential approaches to therapy stress peoples capacity to
choose how they create their existences.
Traditional behaviour therapy focuses mainly on changing observable behaviours by means of providing different or rewarding consequences. The cognitive-behavioural school broadens behaviour therapy to incorporate the contribution of how people think to creating, sustaining and changing their problems. In cognitive-behavioural approaches, therapists assess clients and then intervene to help them to change specific ways of thinking and behaving that sustain their problems.
Classical
psychoanalysis
Originator:
Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939)
Pays great attention to unconscious factors related to infantile sexuality in
the development of neurosis. Psychoanalysis, which may last for many years,
emphasizes working through the transference, in which clients perceive their
therapists as reincarnations of important figures from their childhoods, and the
interpretation of dreams.
Analytical
therapy Originator:
Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)
Divides the unconscious into the personal unconscious and the collective
unconscious, the latter being a storehouse of universal archetypes and
primordial images. Therapy includes analysis of the transference, active
imagination and dream analysis. Jung was particularly interested in working with
clients in the second half of life.
Person-centred
therapy Originator:
Carl Rogers (1902 - 1987)
Lays great stress on the primacy of subjective experience and how clients can
become out of touch with their actualizing tendency through introjecting
others’ evaluations and treating them as if their own. Therapy emphasizes a
relationship characterized by accurate empathy, respect and non-possessive
warmth.
Gestalt
therapy Originator:
Fritz Perls (1893-1970)
Individuals become neurotic by losing touch with their senses and interfering
with their capacity to make strong contact with their environments. Therapy
emphasizes increasing clients’ awareness and vitality through awareness
techniques, experiments, sympathy and frustration, and dream work.
Transactional
analysis Originator:
Eric Berne (1910 - 1970)
Transactions between people take place between their Parent, Adult and Child ego
states. Therapy includes structural analysis of ego states, analysis of specific
transactions, analysis of games - a series of transactions having ulterior
motivations, and analysis of clients’ life scripts.
Reality
therapy Originator:
William Glasser (1925-)
Clients choose to maintain their misery through choosing inappropriate ways to
control the world to satisfy their needs. Therapy includes identifying
clients’ wants and needs, teaching choice theory, planning and, where
appropriate, training clients in behaviours they need to succeed.
Existential
therapy Originators:
Irvin Yalom (1931- ) and Rollo May (1909-1994) Draws on the work of existential philosophers and
focuses on helping clients deal with anxieties connected with four main ultimate
concerns of human existence: death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness.
Therapy focuses on clients’ current situations, with different interventions
used according to the nature of clients’ enveloping fears.
Logotherapy
Originator:
Viktor Frankl (1905 - 1997)
Clients can become neurotic because they face an existential vacuum in which
they are unable to find meaning in their lives. Logotherapists use methods such
as teaching the importance of assuming responsibility for finding meaning,
Socratic questioning, offering meanings and analysing dreams.
Behaviour
therapy Important
figures: theory, Ivan Pavlov (1849 - 1936) and B. F. Skinner (1904 - 1990);
practice, Joseph Wolpe (1915 - 1997)
Emphasizes the learning of behaviour through classical conditioning, operant
conditioning and modelling. Therapy consists of learning adaptive behaviours by
methods such as systematic desensitization, reinforcement programmes and
behaviour rehearsal.
Rational
emotive behaviour therapy
Originator:
Albert Ellis (1913 - )
Emphasizes clients re-indoctrinating themselves with irrational beliefs that
lead to unwanted feelings and self-defeating actions. Therapy involves disputing
clients’ irrational beliefs and replacing them with more rational beliefs.
Elegant or profound therapy entails changing clients’ philosophies of life.
Cognitive
therapy Originator:
Aaron Beck (1921 - )
Clients become distressed because they are faulty processors of information with
a tendency to jump to unwarranted conclusions. Therapy consists of educating
clients in how to test the reality of their thinking by interventions such as
Socratic questioning and conducting real-life experiments.
Multimodal therapy Originator: Arnold Lazarus (1932 - ) Clients respond to situations according to their predominant modalities: behaviour, affect, sensation, imagery, cognition, interpersonal and drugs/biology. Based on a multimodal assessment, therapists are technically eclectic, using a range of techniques selected on the basis of empirical evidence and client need.
And they all have
their own jargon.
For enquiries and appointments call 020 8948 2439
or email bt@mindsci-clinic.com