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Psychodynamic Approaches

History of Psychoanalysis
- Sigmund Freud’s life (1856-1939)
 First born child of 7, given his own room out of a two bedroom apartment
 Went to medical school
 Discovered treatment effective and properties of cocaine

- Many factors may have influenced the development of his theories

- Also, other works influenced his thinking
 Lou Vic Born, writer, one should write about whatever comes to one’s mind; Freud
developed the process of access to the unconscious mind
 Influenced by Darwin’s work; evolution
- Freud’s interactions with other psychoanalytic theories

Freud’s Drive Theory

- Drive and instincts (e.g., sexual drive, death instinct)
 Interchangeable words
 Self-preservative drive
o To keep one self-alive; eating
 Species-preservative drive
o Sex – seek pleasure, avoiding pain
 Death/aggressive instinct
o Accounts for aggressive drives; desire to hurt ourselves or others

 Both occur at the same time (self-preservative and death instinct)

o Chewing
 An aggressive action but need to stay alive
o Love/hate relationship with someone

- Levels of Consciousness
 Conscious
o What are you thinking?
 Preconscious
o A good memory from childhood
o What you ate for lunch today?
 Unconscious
o Containers for memories and emotions that almost feel threatened by by the
conscious mind
o Hostile feeling towards parents – childhood trauma

 Goal of therapy is to bring unconscious feelings to the conscious in order to approach

these problems that within one’s life
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- Structures of Personality
 Id – children are all id, biological forces; how a child can go toward pleasure, and reduce
pain
 Ego – mediates between one’s own pleasure and the reality of the world
o Defence mechanisms to deal with a certain level of anxiety
 Superego – represents the societal/parental values about what is good; we as individuals
develop a moral code – faced with your moral code vs. what one wants to do

 Defense Mechanisms
 Repression: removes painful thoughts, memories, or feelings of conscious
awareness; excluding any painful impulses one might have

 Denial: distortion, not being acknowledge in the same way

 Reaction formation: impulse that one does not want; acting in the opposite
extreme (a person who is mad at their partner; building up over time, may act
extremely friendly)
 Projection: one’s own unacceptable feelings; feelings placed on the person
towards (“why are you mad at me?”)
 Displacement: place their feelings on a more acceptable target
 Sublimation: modify the aggression drive into a socially acceptable way (mad
person uses the aggression energy and takes it out in a sport, not their partner)
 Rationalization: instead of an individual issue (fails a test and says the test was
hard and look for confirmation)
 Regression: regressing to an earlier stage of development (behaviours that were
okay at age 6, not age 14)
 Identification: rather than dealing with negative feeling, may identify with that
person (dress/act like someone you do not life, instead of telling them)
 Intellectualization: talking about feeling in very abstract cohesive ways; making it
sound smart = sound like it makes sense but it does not

Freud’s Drive Theory

 Psychosexual Stages of Development:
o Oral stage (birth to 18 months):
 Interested in eating; species survival aspect
 Establish a connection/bond with one’s parent
 The bond begins with the eating – these two are connected
 According to freud, one might develop a certain personality
 Breast feeding; develop a biting personality – sarcasm
 Gratification, dependency on a parent
 Needs being met or not

o Anal stage (18 months to 3 years):

 Exploring themselves, their bodily functions
 Child is developing their bowel movement
 Overly control their bowel movement
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o Phallic stage (3 to 5 or 6)
 Drives that take over, a sexual gratification that occurs
 Masturbation
 Notation of penis envy, girls wonder why they did not have a penis
 Boys become like their father, girls become like their mother
 If not, Freud states one would have sexual identification later

o Latency (6 to 12)
 Sexual gratification/interest becomes late in this phase and channeled
elsewhere; strong bonds with others, independence, skills that their sexual
gratification suppress

o Genital Stage (beginning age 12)

 Autonomy, one reenergizes their sexual energy with others/ opposite sex

Alternative Perspective on Psychoanalysis

 Ego psychology (Anna Freud, Erik Erikson)
o Anna worked clinically with children with behaviour problems, education setting,
and focused on notation on ego; how individuals develop perspective
o Change notation of self in relation to their parents, themselves, and others;
develop others don’t see what others see
o Student Erik – continued on Freud’s work looking at the ego and across the
lifespan
 You are constantly dealing with crisis, on-going debates, playing out
through one’s life whereas Freud you had a single opportunity to go
through them

 Erikson’s Stages:
o Infancy: trust vs. mistrust (oral)
o Early childhood: autonomy vs. shame & doubt (anal)
o Preschool age: initiative vs. guilt (phallic)
o School age: industry vs. inferiority (latency)
o Adolescence: identity vs role confusion (genital)
o Young adulthood: intimacy vs isolation (genital)
o Middle age: generativity vs. stagnation (genital)
 Accomplished
 How to move forward
 Passing on to the next generation; doing something greater than yourself
o Later life: integrity vs. despair (genital)

 Object Relations Psychology (Donald Winnicott, Otto Kernberg)

o How we see our parents, our love objects
 How the child internalizes that relationship
 In an ideal world, process of individuation
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 A child separate in a healthy way from their parents (mother)

o Have to be the perfect parent:

 Disagrees, be the good enough parents; creates a sense of independency

o Opposing feelings for the same person at the same time: splitting

 Self-Psychology (Heinz Kohut)

o Focusing on one self is a negative thing
 Good and bad self-focus (Kohut): narcissism
 Be able to love yourself before others

 Relational Psychoanalysis
o Focus on relationship of therapist and the client; interaction, therapist perspectives
of the client and how they work with others

Psychoanalytical Approaches to Treatment

 Therapeutic goals:
o Designed to bring out changes in a person’s personality and character structure
o Resolve unconscious conflicts and develop insight to be better to deal with
problems in the future
 Assessment:
o Picture showing – inkblot test
o Thematic apperception test
 What is happening?
 What happened before? The story what they tell will most likely be based
on their experience or how they see the world
 What are they feeling/thinking?
o Draw person task
 Man, women and themselves – see relationship between themselves and
another
 Draw a house
o Sentence completion task
 “the best thing about my family ___”
 Develop a better relationship with client/ parents

 Psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic/psychodynamic therapy, and

psychoanalytic/psychodynamic counseling
 Free association
 Neutrality and empathy
 Resistance
 Interpretation
 Interpretation of Dreams
 Interpretation and Analysis of Transference
 Countertransference
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Effectiveness of Psychodynamic Approaches

 Had been difficult to study effectiveness (hard to define concepts)
o Psychoanalysis and psychanalytic therapy are lengthy
o Complex constructs
o Same phenomena might not be measured in “artificial situations”
 Some research suggest that “patients suitable for psychoanalysis derive substantial
benefits from treatment
 Meta-analysis of psychodynamic therapies have shown significant improvement across a
variety of disorders equivalent to other empirically supportive treatments
 In general, improvements may result from supportive techniques without patients
resolving internal conflicts or achieving insights into their problems
 Shown some success with dealing with substance abuse, depression, anxiety
o However, there is some indication that cognitive therapy may be superior when
dealing with anxiety

History of Jungian Analysis

 Carl Jung born in Switzerland, trained as a psychiatrist
 Widely influenced by philosophy, theology, anthropology, science, and mythology
 Jung and Freud has been impressed with each other’s work and held numerous
discussions
 However, Jung found several of Freud’s ideas of which he did not approve
o Freud = sexual
o 1913 – Freud wrote to Jung “I propose that we abandon our personal relations
entirely”
o After a 6-year turbulent period, Jung became extremely productive in his writing,
teaching, and psychotherapy

Theory of Personality
 Levels of consciousness
o Conscious level:
 Similar to Freuds consciousness
 Things we are aware of: sensation, memories, thoughts, feelings
 Center of this is EGO (ceo of the conscious level) decides what things will
be brought into consciousness, way of organizing the conscious mind
 Makes sense of one’s mind
o Personal unconscious:
 Is everything outside of the conscious mind: resistant of entry
 “what did you have for supper last night?” have to think about it
 Stuff that isn’t admitted to the conscious mind
o Collective unconscious
 There are universalities: we all have similar experiences (of being human)
in a representation of the world / motifs
 One sun, interaction with nature, with mountains
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 Inherit of seeing the world in similar ways (called archetypes)

 Archetypes: persona, anima, animus, shadow, self
o Persona: we all have different representation depending on
the setting we are at, public way of displaying ourselves,
and it varies by which situation you are in (student,
daughter, friend) which one these is the true person?
Recognize all these different persona and bringing them as
a whole and be happy with it
o Anima: the quality of the opposite sex in men, the
expectations men have for woman, or the feminine part of
the male psychi. Ex: women are emotional, so when a man
gets emotional it is his anima coming out
o Animus: masculine traits of the female psychi. Male aspect:
aggression, rationale, stoicism
o Shadow: aspect that we want in therapy. Things that we
would deem unacceptable, sexual, (closest to freud’s IT)

o Personality Attitudes and Cognitive or Mental Functions

 Different dimensions
 Extrovert / introvert
 Different functions
 Judgments (thinking: logical vs feeling: based on occasions in a
situation) / perceptions (ourselves and the world based on our 5
senses)

o Personality development:
 Childhood:

 Adolescence
 Middle age
 Old age

Jungian Analysis and Therapy

 Therapeutic goals:
o About individuation (different aspects to one self and are okay) achieve a sense of
wholeness
 Analysis, therapy, and counselling:
o Rely on dreams and uncovering
 Assessment:
o Projective test to figure out personality test and get at the unconscious mind
 Therapeutic relationship
o Jungian is more humanistic in his approach than Freud
 Stages of therapy:
1. Catharsis: (similar to free association in Freud) expressing intellectual and
emotional secrets
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2. elucidation/interpretation: (one has to interpret the unconscious mind)

3. focus on social needs: how individuals are striving to be better in the world
and to connect with others, help the patient relate better in society
4. transformation/individuation: understand your patterns/see the world/
judgements and how you interact, what you want in term of goals

 Dreams and Analysis:

o There is no filter, no absolute in terms of interpretation, may provide solutions to
the patients current dilemma
 Active imagination:
o A way of helping the client uncover the unconscious mind, an imaginary
conversation with different parts of themselves or in vary aspects of their dreams
 Other techniques:
o Dance therapy, art therapy: founded on the psychoanalytic approach
 Transference and countertransference:
o How client sees you and how you see the client and that could be parabolic of
how others see them