CHAPTER 14
Concept/Applied
LO 3 and 4
Pages: 426-430
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- Compare and contrast the psychoanalytic and humanistic brands of insight therapy.
The main similarity is that both seek to enlighten the individual about internal structures and mechanisms that may be contributing to one’s distress. Differences center on assumptions about the causes of the distress. Psychoanalysis focuses on uncovering unconscious conflicts, motives, and defenses that are not merely adaptive, but which cause distress or dysfunction. Client-centered therapy, a representative humanistic therapy, centers on the notion that distress results from incongruence between one’s self-concept and reality, which causes one to behave in maladaptive ways. The aim is for the individual to “get in touch” with one’s own individual nature and to value it appropriately.
Another difference is in techniques. Psychoanalysis employs free association, dream analysis, and other techniques aimed at allowing and encouraging the emergence of material from the unconscious, which is then interpreted by the analyst. The general approach in client-centered therapy is for the therapist to establish a climate that feels safe enough so that the client is free to examine his or her true nature without feeling it necessary to employ defensive maneuvers.
Integrative
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- Persons with different psychological disorders differ from each other in the extent to which they admit they need help and the extent to which they are resistant to therapy. For which disorders are patients most likely and least likely to cooperate with therapeutic interventions?
Answers should reveal and elaborate upon an understanding of characteristics of the various types of disorders that would influence compliance. For example, patients having disorders in which subjective distress is the main problem should be least resistant, since their pain will motivate them to seek relief.
Anxiety disorders are good examples. Patients with problematic thinking processes might be resistant, depending on the nature of their thought patterns. So certain psychotic delusions would lead to resistance, and a depressed patient whose negative attributional style was well entrenched might be resistant. Certain personality-disordered individuals would certainly be resistant.
Integrative
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- It is believed by some that all psychological disorders can be traced to some sort of biological malfunction, especially malfunctions in the nervous system. In other words, in a perfectly formed and perfectly functioning biological organism, there could be no psychological disorder. If this were true, then the “ultimate cure” for any psychological disorder would be a biomedical cure. Explain why this position does or does not make sense to you.
If your set of philosophical assumptions includes the belief that all psychological phenomena are products of biological activity, then this position will make sense to you. It says, in essence, that the nervous system is the “organ” of thought, emotion, and personality. So disturbances in these domains should be traceable to malfunctions in the nervous system. Psychological disorders may follow from biological problems that are inborn, or environmental events may lead to biological damage, which then leads to psychological disorder. Most modern psychologists are in this camp. This explains, at least in part, why the search for biomedical (especially drug) cures is progressing at a rapid pace and, apparently, quite successfully.
Other psychologists, and students, aren’t comfortable with this position. One argument is that psychological disorders may indeed be caused by biological malfunction but, just as environmental events or subjects’ behaviors may lead to biological damage, in some cases environmental events or behavior changes (including changes in cognitive patterns) may actually lead to repairs of the biological malfunction. Those who don’t agree that the mind is a dependent product of the body may believe that some psychological disorders can exist in a perfectly healthy (biological) organism. In these cases, therapies that focus on changing behavior or thought may be considered the most appropriate.