CHAPTER 4: PSYCHOANALYTIC THERAPY

Key Concepts
 Freudian view of human nature is basically deterministic
 Our behavior is determined by irrational forces, unconscious motivations, and
biological and instinctual drives
 Central to the Freudian approach: INSTINCTS
 LIBIDO: refers to sexual energy; include the energy of all the life instincts –
the instincts serve the purpose of the survival of the individual and the human
race; they are oriented toward growth, development, and creativity; source of
motivation that encompasses sexual energy but goes beyond it; goal of life as
gaining pleasure and avoiding pain.
 DEATH INSTINCTS: account for the aggressive drive; people manifest
through their behavior an unconscious wish to die or to hurt themselves or
others
 Powerful determinants of why people act as they do: SEXUAL AND
AGGRESSIVE DRIVES
Structure of Personality
 ID: roughly all the untamed drives or impulses that might be likened to the
biological component
 Original system of personality; at birth a person is all id.
 Primary source of psychic energy and the seat of the instincts
 Lacks organization and is blind, demanding, and insistent
 Cannot tolerate tension
 Functions to discharge tension immediately
 Pleasure principle
 Aimed a reducing tension, avoiding pain, and gaining pleasure
 Illogical, amoral, and driven to satisfy instinctual need
 Never matures, remaining the spoiled brat of personality
 Does not think, but only wishes or acts
 Largely unconscious, or out of awareness
 Knows only subjective reality
 EGO: has contact with the external world
 the “executive”
 governs, controls, and regulates the personality
 “Traffic cop”; it mediates between the instincts and the surrounding
environment
 controls consciousness and exercises censorship
 ruled by the reality concept; does realistic and logical thinking and
formulates plans of action for satisfying needs
 seat of intelligence and rationality, checks and controls the blind impulses
of the id
 distinguishes between mental images and things in the external world
 SUPEREGO: the judicial branch of personality
  Includes a person’s moral code
 Represents the ideal rather than the real and strives not for pleasure but
for perfection
 Represents the traditional values and ideas of society as they are handed
down from parents to children
 inhibit the id impulsive, persuade the eagle to substitute moralistic goals
for realistic ones and to strive for perfection
 Related to psychological rewards and punishments; the rewards are
feelings of pride and self love the punishments are feelings of guilt and
inferiority
Consciousness and the Unconscious
 The keys to understanding behaviour and the problems of personality are
the conscious and the levels of consciousness
 Clinical evidence for postulating the unconscious dreams – representation
of unconscious needs, wishers, and conflicts; slips of the tongue then
forgetting, post hypnotic suggestions, material derived from free
association techniques, material derived from projected technique, the
symbolic content of psychotic symptoms
 Consciousness is a thin slice of the total mind
 The unconscious stores all experiences, memories, and repressed
material
 Needs and motivations that are inaccessible that is out of awareness or
also outside the sphere of conscious control
 Aim of psychoanalytic therapy, make the unconscious motives conscious,
for only then can an individual exercise choice
 Unconscious processes are at the root of all forms of neurotic symptoms
and behaviours
 A cure is based on uncovering the meaning of symptoms, the causes of
behaviour, and the repressed materials that interfere with healthy
functioning
 Intellectual insight alone does not resolve the symptom
 The clients need to cling to old patterns (repetition) must be confronted by
working through transference distortions
Anxiety
 Is a feeling of dread insults from repressed feelings, memories, desires, and
experience emerged to the surface of awareness.
 A state of tension that motivates us to do something.
 To warn of impending danger.
 reality anxiety: The fear of danger from the external world. And the level of
such anxiety is proportionate to the degree of real threat
 Neurotic anxiety: The fear that the instincts will get out of hand and cause
one to do something for which one will be punished.
  Moral anxiety: The fear of one's own conscience; People with a well
developed conscience tend to feel guilty when they do something contrary to
their moral code. When the eagle cannot control anxiety by rational and direct
methods. It relies on indirect ones, namely ego defense behavior
Ego- Defense Mechanisms
 Help the individual cope with anxiety and prevent the ego from being
overwhelmed.
 Normal behaviours that can have adaptive value provided they do not become
a style of life that the individual to avoid facing reality.
 The defenses employed depend on the individual's level of the development
and degree of anxiety.
 Defense mechanisms have two characteristics in common.
1. They either deny or distort reality.
2. They operate on an unconscious level.
- repression
-- threatening or painful thoughts and feelings are excluded from
awareness
- denial
-- “closing one's eyes” to the existence of a threatening aspect of reality
- reaction formation
-- actively expressing the opposite impulse when confronted with a
threatening impulse
- projection
-- attributing to others one’s own unacceptable desires and impulses
- displacement
-- directing energy toward another object or person when the original
object or person is inaccessible
- rationalization
-- manufacturing good reasons to explain away a bruised ego
- sublimation
-- Diverting sexual or aggressive energy into other channels
- Regression
-- going back to an earlier phase of development when there were
fewer demands
- introjection
-- taking in and swallowing the values and standards of others
- identification
-- Identifying with successful causes, organisations, or people in the
hope that you will be perceived as worthwhile
- compensation
-- Masking perceived weaknesses or developing certain positive traits
to make up for limitations
Development of Personality
psychosexual stages refer to the Freudian chronological phases of development
beginning in infancy. Freud postulated three early stages of development that often
bring people to counselling when not appropriately resolved.
 Oral stage
 Which deals with the inability to express oneself and others, resulting in
the fear of loving and forming close relationships and low esteem
 Anal stage
 which 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 Stage
 Which deals with the inability to fully accept one sexuality and sexual
feelings, and also to difficulty in accepting oneself as a man or woman
This three areas of personal and social development-love and trust, dealing with
negative feelings, and developing a positive acceptance of sexuality-are all grounded
in the first six years of life. This. Is the foundation on which later personality
development is built. When a child's needs are not adequately met during these
stages of development, an individual may become fixated at that stage and behave
in psychologically immature ways later on in life.
Erickson's psychosocial perspective
- refer to basic psychological and social tasks which individuals need to master at
intervals from infancy through old age. Perspective provides the counsellor with the
conceptual tools for understanding key developmental tasks characteristic of the
various stages of life. It holds that psychosexual growth and psychosocial growth
take place together, and that at each stage of life we faced the task of establishing
equilibrium between ourselves and our social world.
 Crisis-equivalent to a turning point in life when we have the potential to
move forward or to regress
 Classical psychoanalysis-grounded on each psychology, and it holds that
instincts an intrapsychic conflicts or the basic factor shaping personality
development (both normal and abnormal)
 contemporary psychoanalysis-tends to be based on ego psychology,
which does not deny the role of intrapsychic conflicts but emphasises the
striving of the ego for mastery and competence throughout the human
lifespan. Ego psychology deals with both the early and the later
developmental stages, for the assumption is that current problems cannot
simply be reduced to repetitions of unconscious conflicts from early
childhood.
Table 4.2
- the key needs and developmental tasks, along with the challenges inherent at each
stage of life, provide a model for understanding some of the core conflicts clients
explore in their therapy sessions. Psychosocial theory gives special away to
childhood and adults and factors that are significant in later stages of development
while recognising that the later stages also have their significant crisis.

Therapeutic Goals
- Adaptive functioning, which involves the reduction of symptoms and the
resolution of conflicts
- To make the unconscious conscious and to strengthen the ego so that the
behaviour is based more on reality and last an instinctual cravings or irrational
guilt
- Significant modification of the individual's personality and character structure
- Therapeutic methods are used to bring out unconscious material
- Childhood experiences are reconstructed, discussed, interpreted, and
analysed
- The process is not limited to solving problems and learning new behaviours
- Oriented toward achieving insight
- feelings and memories associated with this self-understanding be
experienced

Therapist’s Function and Role

- Blank-screen approach - engage in very little self disclosure and in a sense
of neutrality to foster a transparent relationship, in which their clients will make
projections onto them
- transference relationship - refers to the transfer of feelings originally
experienced in an early relationship to other important people in a persons
present environment
- projections are considered “grist for the mill” and their analysis is the very
essence of therapeutic work
- Central functions of analysis - help clients acquire the freedom to love,
work, and play; Assisting clients in achieving self-awareness, honesty, and
more effective personal relationships; In dealing with anxiety in a realistic way;
And in gaining control over impulsive and irrational behaviour; teach clients
the meaning of these processes (through interpretation) so that they are able
to achieve insight into their problems, increase their awareness of ways to
change, and thus gain more control over their lives
- the analyst listens, learns, end decides when to make appropriate
interpretations. A major function of interpretation is to accelerate the process
of uncovering unconscious material the analyst listens for gaps and
inconsistencies in the client story, in first the meaning of reported dreams and
free associations, and remain sensitive to clues concerning the clients
feelings toward the analyst.
 - If the therapist pushes the client too rapidly or offers ill-timed interpretations,
therapy will not be effective

Client’s Experience in Therapy

 Classical Psychoanalysis
 Free association - they tried to say whatever comes to mind without self
censorship
- Known as the fundamental rule
- client report their feelings, experiences, associations, memories, and
fantasies to the analyst
- Lying on the couch encourages deep, uncensored reflections and reduces
that might interfere with getting in touch with internal conflicts and productions
- also, this client's ability to read their analysts face for reactions and hence,
fosters the projections characteristic of a transference
- the analyst is freed from having to carefully monitor facial clues
 free to express any idea or feeling, no matter how irresponsible, scandal
loose, politically incorrect, selfish, or infantile
 the analyst remains non-judgmental, listening carefully and asking questions
and making interpretations as the analysis progresses
 encourages the client to loosen defense mechanisms and “regress,”
experiencing a less rigid level of adjustment that allows for positive
therapeutic growth but also involves some vulnerability
 Psychodynamic therapists do remain alert to transference manifestations,
explore the meaning of clients dreams, explore both the past and are
concerned with unconscious material
 Psychoanalytic clients are ready to terminate their sessions when they and
their analysts mutually agreed that they have resolved those symptoms and
core conflicts that were amenable to resolution, have clarified an accepted
their remaining emotional problems, have understood the historical roots of
their difficulties, have mastery of course themes, have insight into how their
environment affects them and how they affect the environment, have achieved
with those defensiveness, and can integrate their awareness of past problems
with their present relationships

Relationship Between Therapist and Client

 Transference
- The client unconscious shifting to the analyst of feelings and fantasies that
are reactions to significant others in the clients’ past. It involves the
unconscious repetition of the past in the present. “It reflects the deep pattern
name of all the experiences in relationships as they emerge in current life.”
 Working through
 - Process consists of repetitive and elaborate explorations of unconscious
material and defenses, most of which originated in early childhood
- Achieved by repeating interpretations and by exploring forms of resistance
- Result in a resolution of old patterns and allows clients to make new choices
 Countertransference
-