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Myers 7th Edition Psychology: Chapter 17 Outline
Myers 7th Edition Psychology: Chapter 17 Outline
Myers 7th Edition Psychology: Chapter 17 Outline
Psychoanalysis
• Freud’s therapeutic technique. He believed the patient’s free associations, resistances,
dreams and transferences- and the therapist’s interpretations- released previously
repressed feelings.
• Theory presumes that healthier, less anxious living becomes possible when the patients
release the energy they had previously devoted to id-ego-superego conflicts.
o Resistance: The blocking from consciousness of anxiety-laden material.
Repressing anxiety prone material
o Interpretation: suggestions of underlying wishes feelings and conflicts.
Aim to provide subject with insight.
o Transference the patient’s transfer to the analyst of emotions linked with other
relationships. (You begin to feel attracted to analyst…)
• Critics say that this theory can’t be proven, psychoanalysts agree: it’s therapy, not
science.
o It just helps the patient in some situations.
• Interpersonal psychotherapists focus more on the immediate situations of patients and
how they can cope with the problems they are facing.
Humanistic Therapies
• Humanistic therapists tend to focus on:
o The present and future more than past.
o Conscious rather than unconscious.
o Promoting growth instead of curing illness.
• Client-centered therapy: developed by Carl Rogers: the therapist uses techniques such
as active listening within a genuine, accepting, empathetic environment to facilitate
clients’ growth.
o Active Listening: echoing, restating, and seeking clarification of what the client
expresses and acknowledging the expressed feelings.
• One cannot be totally nondirective.
• Accept and understand the client.
Behavior Therapies
• They doubt the healing power of self-awareness, and the ideas of Freud.
• They assume problem behaviors are the problems.
Cognitive Therapies
• Therapy that teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking and acting; based on
the assumption that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions.
• Cognitive therapists try in various ways to teach people new, more constructive ways of
thinking.
Cognitive Therapy for Depression
• Aaron Beck
o Sought to reverse clients’ catastrophizing beliefs about themselves, situations, and
their future
• Builds on the finding that depressed people do not express the self-serving bias common
in non-depressed people.
• Cognitive-Behavior Therapy: a popular integrated therapy that combines cognitive
therapy (changing self-defeating thinking) with behavior therapy (changing behavior).
o Experiment with depressed people writing down all the positive things that
happened and how they contributed to them. This caused depression to go down
substantially.
o We often think in words, therefore getting people to change what they say to
themselves is an effective way to change their thinking.
Meichenbaum’s stress inoculation training.
• Training to reconstruct thinking in stressful situations.
• “Training to dispute negative thoughts.”
Evaluating Psychotherapies
• Many people believe that psychotherapy is very effective
• Millions of Americans seek mental help specialists and physicians every year.
Is Psychotherapy Effective?
Clients’ Perceptions
• 3 out of 4 clients reported themselves satisfied and 1 in 2 said they were “very satisfied”
with psychotherapy.
• Reasons what client testimonials don’t persuade psychotherapy’s skeptics:
o People often enter therapy in crisis
o Clients may need to believe the therapy was worth the effort
o Clients generally like their therapists and speak kindly of them
• One experiment found that boys that seemed sure to end up in jail had a higher rate of
committing a crime if they had psychotherapy than if they did not.
Clinicians’ Perceptions
• Because people enter therapy when they are extremely unhappy, and usually leave when
they are less extremely unhappy, most therapists (like most clients) testify to therapy’s
success.
Outcome Research
• Meta-analysis – a procedure for statistically combining the results of many different
research studies. (Combining them into one big result)
• The average therapy client ends up better off than 80% of the untreated individuals on
waiting lists.
o “Hundreds of studies have shown that psychotherapy works better than nothing.”
• Those not undergoing therapy often improve, but those undergoing therapy are more
likely to improve.
• Extravagant expectations that psychotherapy will transform your life and personality
seem unwarranted.
• Therapy is most effective when the problem is clear-cut.
Electroconvulsive Therapy
• Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) – a biomedical therapy for severely depressed
patients in which a brief electric current is sent through the brain of an anesthetized
patient.
o Many studies confirm that ECT is an effective treatment for severe depression in
patients who have no responded to drug treatment.
o No one knows for sure how this process works or why for that matter.
• ECT-treated patients are vulnerable to relapse- just like as other depression treated
patients.
• Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation – (rTMS) when repeated pulses surge
through a magnetic coil that is held to a person’s skull just above the right eyebrow.
Psychosurgery
• Psychosurgery – surgery that removes or destroys brain tissue in an effort to change
behavior.
• Lobotomy – once used procedure that cut the nerves that connect the frontal lobes to the
emotion-controlling centers of the inner brain.
o Disappeared with the emergence of psychoactive drugs.
o Produced a permanently lethargic, immature, impulsive personality.
o Used today as only a last resort.