A Report on

The Psychoanalytic Approach

& The Client-Centered Approach

In Partial Fulfillment

Of the Requirements

In Basic Guidance and Counseling Techniques

Submitted to:

Cynthia S. Alpas, DM-HRM

Submitted by:

James Franklin L. Chin, RN

Submitted on:

May 9, 2010
 SIGMUND FREUD’S PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY

Psychoanalysis – a personality theory, a philosophical system, and a method of psychotherapy.

Psychoanalytic Therapy – the first system psychotherapy.

- 1st of the 3 major schools of psychology

- 2nd being behaviorism
- 3rd being existential-humanistic psychology

Major Historical Contributions:

1. An individual’s mental life can be understood, and the insights into human nature can
be applied to alleviate some human suffering.
2. Human behavior is often governed by unconscious factors.
3. Early childhood development has a profound effect on adult functioning.
4. This theory has provided a meaningful framework for understanding the ways in which
an individual attempts to cope with anxiety by postulating mechanisms to avoid
becoming engulfing in anxiety.
5. This theory offers ways of tapping the unconscious through the analysis of dreams,
resistances, and transferences.

Structure of Personality

1. Id – “biological component”, PLEASURE

- Original system of personality.
- Primary source of psychic energy and the seat of instincts.
- Lacks organization; blind, demanding, and insistent.
- Can’t tolerate tension; it functions to discharge tension immediately and return
to a homeostatic condition.
- Aimed at reducing tension, avoiding pain, and gaining pleasure.
- Illogical, amoral, and driven by one consideration: to satisfy instinctual needs.
- Never matures but remains the spoiled brat of personality.
- Does not think but only wishes or acts.
- Unconscious
 2. Ego – “psychological component” REALITY
- Contact with the external world of reality.
- Executive of personality that governs, controls, and regulates.
- Principal job is to mediate between the instincts and the surrounding
environment.
- Controls consciousness and exercises censorship.
- Does realistic and logical thinking and formulates plans of action for satisfying
needs.
- Seat of intelligence and rationality that checks and controls the blind impulses of
the id.
- Id knows only subjective reality whereas the ego distinguishes between mental
images and things in the external world.

3. Superego – “social component”

- Moral, judicial, branch of personality.
- A person’s moral code, the main concern being whether action is good or bad,
right or wrong.
- Represents the ideal rather than the real, and strives not for pleasure but for
perfection.
- Represents the traditional values and ideals of society as they are handed down
from parents to children.
- Functions to inhibit the id impulses, to persuade the ego to substitute moralistic
goals for realistic ones, and to strive for perfection.
- Internalization of the standards of parents and society, is related to psychological
rewards and punishments.
 Rewards = feelings of pride and self-love
 Punishments = feelings of guilt and inferiority

VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE

Human Nature is essentially pessimistic, deterministic, mechanistic, and reductionistic.

Human beings are determined by irrational forces, unconscious motivations, biological and
instinctual needs and drives, and psychosexual events during the first five years of life.

-energy systems
 Orthodox’ Freudian view, the dyanamics of personality consists of the ways in which psychic
energy is distributed to the id, ego, and superego. Since the amount of energy is limited, one
system gains control over the available energy at the expense of the other two systems.

Role of Instincts

 All instinct are innate and biological

 He stressed the sexual instincts and the aggressive impulses.

 All human behavior desires to gain pleasure and avoid pain.

 Human have both life instincts and death instincts.

 The goal of all life is death; life is but a roundabout way to death.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND UNCONSCIOUSNESS

Clinical evidence for postulating the concept of the unconscious:

1. Dreams – symbolic representations of unconscious needs, wishes, and conflicts.

2. Slips of the tongue & forgetting

3. Post-hypnotic suggestions

4. Material derived from free association techniques

5. Material derived from protective techniques

Consciousness – a thin slice of the total mind.

Unconsciousness – out of awareness, stores up all experiences, memories, and repressed

material. Also needs and motivations that are inaccessible; it influences behavior.

Unconscious processes are the roots of all dorms of neurotic symptoms and behaviors.

A cure is based on uncovering the meaning of symptoms, the causes of behavior, and the
repressed materials that interfere with healthy functioning.

AIM: to make the unconscious motives conscious, for only when one becomes conscious of
motivations can one exercise choice.
ANXIETY

 State of tension that motivates us to do something.

 Function: to warn of impending danger.

3 Kinds of Anxiety:

1. Reality Anxiety – the fear of danger from the external world.

2. Neurotic Anxiety – the fear that the instincts will get out of hand and cause one to do
something for which one will be punished.

3. Moral Anxiety – the fear of one’s own conscience.

EGO-DEFENSE MECHANISMS

THERAPEUTIC PROCESS

Goal of Analytic Therapy: to reform the individual’s character structure by making the
unconscious conscious in the client.

 Past experiences are reconstructed, discussed, analyzed, and interpreted with the aim
of personality reconstruction.

 Emphasizes the affective dimension of making the unconscious known.

THE THERAPIST’S FUNCTION AND ROLE

Characteristics:

 Remains anonymous

 Engages in very little sharing of his or her own feelings and experiences.

 Establish a working relationship

 Do a lot of listening and interpreting

  Pays particular attention to resistance of the patient

 Listens for gaps and inconsistencies in the client’s story

 Infers the meaning of the client’s reported dreams and free-associating

 Carefully observes the client during therapy session

 Remains sensitive to clues concerning the client’s feelings toward the analyst

Concerns:

 mainly with assisting the client in achieving self-awareness, honesty, and more effective
personal relationships

 in dealing with anxiety in a realistic way

 in gaining control over impulsive and irrational behavior.

THE CLIENT’S EXPEREINCE IN THERAPY

 Intensive and long term therapy process

 Several times weekly

 For 3-5 years

 Last an hour

 Lies on the couch

 Free association

 Agreement with paying fees, attending sessions at a certain time, and making a
commitment to an intensive process.

Stages:

 Developing a growing relationship with the analyst

 Experiencing treatment crisis

 Gaining insight into his/her past and unconscious

 Developing resistances to learning more about himself/herself

  Developing a transference relationship with the analyst

 Deepening the therapy

 Working through the resistances and uncovered material

 Termination of therapy

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THERAPIST AND CLIENT

Transference – allows the client to attribute to the therapist “unfinished business” from the
client’s past relationships with significant people.

Treatment process involves the client’s reconstruction and reliving the past.

Hostile feelings = negative transference

Falling in love, wish to be adopted, seek love, acceptance, and approval = positive transference

Countertransference – can consist feelings of dislike or excessive attachment and

involvement.

APPLICATION: THERAPEUTIC TECHNIQUES AND PROCEDURE

Techniques:

 Geared to increasing awareness

 Gaining intellectual insights into the cleint’s behavior

 Understanding the meanings of symptoms

5 basic techniques of psychoanalytic approach:

o Free Association

 Central technique
  A method of recalling past experiences and of discharging the emotions
associated with past traumatic situations, known as “catharsis.”

 The analyst instructs the client to clear his mind of day-to-day thoughts and
preoccupations and, as much as possible, to say whatever comes to mind,
regardless of how painful, silly, trivial, illogical, or irrelevant it may be.

 The analyst task is to identify the repressed material that is locked in the
unconscious.

o Interpretation

 Basic procedure used in analyzing free associations, dreams, resistances and

transferences.

 The analyst points out, explains, and even teaches the client the meanings of
behavior that is manifested by dreams, free associations, resistances and the
therapeutic relationship itself.

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

General rule:

(1) It should be presented at a point where the phenomenon to be interpreted is

close to the client’s conscious awareness.

(2) It should always start from the surface and go only as deep as the client is able to
go while experiencing the situation emotionally.

(3) It is best to point out a resistance or defense before interpreting the emotion or
conflict that lies beneath the resistance or defense.

o Dream Analysis

 Important procedure for uncovering unconscious material and giving the patient
an insight into some areas of unresolved problems.

 Dreams – royal road to the unconscious

2 levels of content:

i. Latent Content – consists of the disguised, hidden, symbolic, and

unconscious motives.
 ii. Manifest Content - the dream as it appears to the dreamer.

Dream work – the process by which the latent content of a dream is

transformed into the less threatening manifest content.

o Analysis of Resistance

Resistance – a fundamental concept to the practice of psychoanalysis, is anything that

works against the progress of the therapy and prevents the client from producing
unconscious material.

- Unconscious dynamic that attempted to defend the person against

intolerable anxiety.

o Analysis of Transference

- A central technique in psychoanalysis for it allows the client to relive

his/her past in therapy.

- Enables the client to achieve insight into the nature of his/her

fixations and deprivations, and it provides an understanding of the
influence of the past as it relates to present functioning.

CARL ROGERS’ CLIENT-CENTERED THEORY

Client-Centered Therapy – based on a subjective view of human experiencing, it places more

faith in and gives more responsibility to the client in dealing with problems.

- A specialized branch of humanistic therapy that highlights the

experiencing of a client and his/her subjective and phenomenal
world.
 - Puts great faith in the client’s capacity to lead the way in therapy an
find his/her own direction.

The therapist functions mainly as a facilitator of personal growth by helping the client discover
his/her own capacities for solving problems.

VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE

o Rejects the concept of the individual’s basic negative tendencies.

o Sees people as socialized and forward-moving, as striving to become fully functioning,

and as having at the deepest core a positive goodness.

o Rejects the concept of therapists as the authority who knows best and that of the
passive client who merely follows the dictates of the therapist.

Characteristics:

o Focuses on the client’s responsibility and capacity to discover ways to more fully
encounter reality.

o Emphasizes the phenomenal world of the client.

o The client experiences psychotherapeutic growth in and through the relationship with
another person who helps the client do what the client cannot do alone.

o Not a set of techniques, nor is it a dogma.

THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS

THERAPEUTIC GOALS

 Basic Goal: To provide a climate conductive to helping the individual become a fully
functioning person.

Characteristics:

1. Openness to Experience

a. Entails seeing reality without distorting it to fit a preconceived self-structure.

 b. Implies becoming more aware of reality as it exists outside oneself.

c. Means that one’s beliefs are not rigid; one can remain open to further
knowledge and growth and can tolerate ambiguity. One has an awareness of
oneself in the present moment and the capacity to experience oneself in fresh
ways.

2. Trust in One’s Organism

a. As clients become more open to their experiences, their sense of trust in self
begins to emerge.

3. An Internal Locus of Evaluation

a. Looking more to oneself for the answers to the problems of existence.

b. One substitutes self-approval for the universal approval of others.

c. One decides one’s own standards of behavior and looks to oneself for the
decisions and choices to live by.

4. Willingness to Be a Process

a. Growth is a continuing process.

b. The therapist does not choose specific goals for the client, but the client have
the capacity to define and clarify their own goals.

THE THERAPIST’S FUNCTIONS AND ROLE

Role: rooted in his/her ways of being and attitudes, not in the implementation of techniques
designed to get the client to do something.

The therapist’s role is to be without roles.

Function: to establish a therapeutic climate that facilitates the client’s growth along a process
continuum

Through the therapist’s attitudes of genuine caring, respect, acceptance, and understanding,
the client is able to loosen his/her defenses and rigid perceptions and move to a higher level of
personal functioning.
6 Conditions for personality changes:

1. Two persons are in psychological contact.

2. The first, whom we shall term the client, is in a state of incongruence, being vulnerable
or anxious.
3. The second person, whom shall term the therapist, is congruent or integrated in the
relationship.
4. The therapist experiences unconditional positive regard for the client.
5. The therapist experiences an empathic understanding of the client’s internal frame of
reference and endeavors to communicate this experience to the client.
6. The communication to the client of the therapist’s empathic understanding and
unconditional positive regard is to a minimal degree achieved.

3 Personal Characterisctics/Attitudes of the Therapist:

1. Congruence – implies that the therapist is real, genuine, integrated, and authentic
during therapeutic hour.

Client-centered therapy does stress the value of nonexploitive, authentic, personal

relationship and the potential value of open and honest feedback when meaningful
communication is blocked. It also stresses that counseling will be inhibited if the
counselor feels one way about the client but acts in a different way.

2. Unconditional Positive Regard

a. A deep and genuine caring for the client as a person.
b. It is not an attitude of “I’ll accept you when”; rather, it is one of “I’ll accept you
as you are.”
c. Acceptance is the recognition of the client’s right to have feelings; it is not the
approval of all behavior.

3. Accurate Emphatic Understanding

Aim:
 to encourage the client to get closer to himself/herself
 to experience feelings more deeply and intensely
 to recognize and resolve the incongruity that exists within the client.

Empathy –more than a mere reflection of feeling.

 - Deep and subjective understanding of the client with the client.

Teachers Can Make a Difference (1973)

1. Discover what the teacher wants and strive to please the teacher.
2. Never question the teacher’s authority.
3. Learning is the result of external motivation.
4. Learners should always search for the one right answer.
5. Learners should be passive.
6. Learning should is a product rather than a process.
7. School learning is separate from living.
8. The self is ignored in education.
9. Learners are objects, not persons.
10. Feelings are not important in education.
11. Teachers ought to keep at a distance from students.
12. Schools teach us to be dishonest.
13. Students are not to be trusted.

CONTRIBUTIONS:

- Emphasizes active listening

- Respecting the client
- Adopting the internal frame of reference of the client
- Staying with the client as opposed to getting ahead of the client with interpretations

PERIODS OF DEVELOPMENT

1. Period 1 (1940-1950) Nondirective psychotherapy

a. This approach emphazised the therapist’s creation of a permissive and
noninterventive climate.
b. Acceptance and Clarification

2. Period 2 (1950-1957) Reflective psychotherapy

a. A client was able to develop a greater degree of congruence between self-
concept and ideal self-concept.

3. Period 3 (1957-1970) Experiental therapy

a. Therapy focuses on the client’s experiencing and the expression of the
therapist’s experiencing.
b. The client grows on a continuum by learning to use immediate experiencing.