Chapter 2 Psychoanalytic Theory (2)

PSCHOANALYTIC

THEORY (2)

Note taken from Key Reference Text :
Theory & Practice of Counseling & Psychotherapy, Gerald Corey 9th Ed.
Note taking by ONG SING YEE (KB, PA)

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS
THERAPEUTIC TECHNIQUES AND

PROCESS

KEY CONCEPTS:
Development of Personality

Counseling implications
 What are some major developmental tasks at each stage

in life, and how are these tasks related to counseling?
 What themes give continuity to this individual’s life?
 What are some universal concerns of people at various

points in life? How can people be challenged to make
life affirming choices at these points?
 What is the relationship between an individual’s current
problems and significant events from earlier years?
 What choices were made at critical periods, and how did
the person deal with these various crises?
 What are the socio cultural factors influencing
development that need to be understood if therapy is to
be comprehensive?

THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS-
Therapeutic Goals

 Ultimate goal: Increase adaptive
functioning, which involves the reduction
of symptoms and the resolution of conflicts

 Goals :

1. Make the unconscious conscious and to
strengthen the ego so that behavior is
based on reality and less on instinctual
cravings or irrational guilt.

2. Oriented toward achieving insight.

THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS-
Therapist’s Function and Role

 Blank screen approach

- Little self disclosure

- Maintain a sense of neutrality to foster a transference
relationship in which their clients will make projections
onto them.

 Transference relationship = the transfer of feelings original
experienced in an early relationship to other important
people in a person’s present environment.

 Central functions of analyst :

- help clients acquire the freedom to love, work and play

- Assisting clients in achieving self awareness, honesty and
more effective personal relationships

- More effective personal relationships

- In gaining control over impulsive and irrational behavior

- Dealing with anxiety in a realistic way

THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS-
Therapist’s Function and Role

 The analyst must 1st establish a working
relationship with the client and then do a great
deal of listening and interpreting.

 Client’s intra psychic world---- client’s resistances

 Function interpretation : accelerate the process
of uncovering unconscious material

 Central function of a analyst

- Teach clients the meaning of these processes
(through interpretation) so that hey are able to
achieve insight into problems

- Increase their awareness of ways to change and
thus gain more control over their lives.

THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS-
Client’s Experience in Therapy
(Classical)

 Willing to commit themselves to an intensive and
long term therapy process.

 1st – face to face sessions

 Lie on a couch and engage in free association

- Reduces clients’ ability to “read” their analyst’s
face for reactions

- The analyst is freed from having to carefully
monitor facial clues.

 Experience a unique relationship with the
analyst.

 Free to express

THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS-
Client’s Experience in Therapy

Clients make a commitment.
Clients are asked not to make any

radical changes in their lifestyle.
Clients are ready for termination

once goals are achieved.

THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS –
Relationship Between Therapist
and Client

 Classical analyst stands outside the relationship,
comments on it, and offers insight producing
interpretations.

 Contemporary:

- Therapist does not strive for a nonparticipating,
detached and objective stance, but attuned to the

nature of the therapeutic relationship.

- Here and now transference as on earlier enactment.

- Emotional communication with clients, gain
information and create connection.

THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS –
Relationship Between Therapist
and Client

Transference:

- The client’s unconscious shifting to the
analyst of feelings and fantasies that are
reactions to significant others in the
client’s past.

- Unconscious repetition of the past in the
present.

 Working through process consist of
repetitive and elaborate explorations of
unconscious material and defenses.

THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS –
Relationship Between Therapist
and Client

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 were
triggered.

 Strongest source of data for
understanding both parties.

SEMINAR OBJECTIVE

Therapeutic Techniques and Processes
▪ Understand and able to apply the concepts

below:
✓ Maintaining the Analytic Framework
✓ Free Association
✓ Interpretation
✓ Dream Analysis
✓ Analysis and Interpretation of Resistance
✓ Analysis and interpretation of Transference

APPLICATION: THERAPEUTIC
TECHNIQUES AND PROCEDURES

 Features

- The therapy is geared more to limited objectives than to restructuring
one’s personality

- The therapist is less likely to use the couch

- There are fewer sessions each week.

- There is more frequent use of supportive interventions such as
reassurance, expressions of empathy and support and suggestions.

- There is more emphasis on the here and now relationship between
therapist and client.

- There is more latitude for therapist self disclosure without polluting the
transference.

- Less emphasis is given to the therapist’s neutrality.

- There is focus on mutual transference and countertransference
enactments.

- The focus is more on pressing practical concerns than on working with
fantasy material.

APPLICATION: THERAPEUTIC
TECHNIQUES AND PROCEDURES

 Aimed : to increase awareness, fostering
insights into the client’s behavior and
understanding the meanings of
symptoms

 The therapy proceeds from the client’s
talk to catharsis, to insight, to working
through unconscious material

APPLICATION: THERAPEUTIC
TECHNIQUES AND PROCEDURES

Maintaining the Analytic Framework

 Whole range of procedural and stylistic
factors

- Analyst’s relative anonymity, maintaining
neutrality and objectivity, the regularity
and consistency of meetings, starting
and ending the sessions on time, clarity
on fees, and basic boundary issues such
as the avoidance of advice giving or
impositions of the therapist’s values.

 Consistency frameworks is itself a
therapeutic factor.

APPLICATION: THERAPEUTIC
TECHNIQUES AND PROCEDURES

Free Association
 Clients are encouraged to say whatever

comes to mind.
 Reporting them immediately without

censorship
 Open to unconscious wishes, fantasies,

conflicts and motivation. --- recollection
of past experiences, a catharsis or
release of intense feelings that have
been blocked.

APPLICATION: THERAPEUTIC
TECHNIQUES AND PROCEDURES

Interpretation

 Analyst‘s pointing out, explaining and even teaching the client
the meanings of behavior that is manifested in dreams, free
association, resistances and the therapeutic relationship itself.

 Function : enable the ego to assimilate new material and to
speed up the process of uncovering further unconscious material

 The therapist uses the client’s reactions as a gauge in determining
a client’s readiness to make an interpretation.

 Rule

- Interpret material that the client has not yet seen but is capable
of tolerating and incorporating.

- Should start from surface and go only as deep as the client is able
to go.

APPLICATION: THERAPEUTIC
TECHNIQUES AND PROCEDURES

Dream Analysis
 Royal road to the unconscious
 One’s unconscious wishes, needs and

fears are expressed.
 Latent content: hidden, symbolic and

unconscious motives, wishes and fears.
 Manifest content: is the dream as it

appears to the dreamer.
 Therapist : uncover disguised meanings by

studying the symbols in the manifest
content of the dream.

APPLICATION: THERAPEUTIC

TECHNIQUES AND PROCEDURES

Analysis and Interpretation of Resistance

 Resistance

- Client’s reluctance to bring to the surface of awareness
unconscious material that has been repressed.

- Any idea, attitude, feeling or action (conscious or
unconscious) that fosters the status quo and gets in the way of
change.

- Unconscious dynamic that people use to defend against the
intolerable anxiety and pain that would arise if they were to
become aware of their repressed impulses and feelings.

- Protect individuals against anxiety and fear of change.

 Therapist point out and interpret the most obvious resistances
to lessen the possibility of clients’ rejecting in the interpretation
and to increase the chance that they will begin to look at
their resistive behavior.

APPLICATION: THERAPEUTIC
TECHNIQUES AND PROCEDURES

Analysis and interpretation of Transference
 Interpreting transference is a route to

elucidating the client’s intrapsychic life.
 Client can recognize how they are

repeating the same dynamic patterns in
their relationships with the therapist.
 Allows clients to achieve here and now
insight into the influence of the past on
their present functioning.

THANK YOU