Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Theories and Techniques of Counselling

 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Psychoanalytic Theories
View of Human Nature:
Human Instincts:
• Eros
• Thanatos
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Structure of personality:
• Id
• Ego
• Super Ego
Levels of mind:
• Conscious
• Sub conscious
• Unconscious
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Defence Mechanism
• Repression
• Denial
• Regression
• Projection
• Rationalization
• Reaction Formation
• Displacement
• Sublimation
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Psychosexual developmental stages

• Oral stage
• Anal stage
• Phallic stage
• Latency stage
• Genital stage
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Goals
• Help client become more aware of the unconscious aspects of his or
her personality and make them conscious to strengthen ego
• Develop insight
• Help client to cope with demands of the society
• Psychoanalysis stress on adjustment in area of work and intimacy
• Childhood experiences are discussed, interpreted, analysed and
reconstructed.
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Role of Counsellor (therapist as per Psychoanalytic approach)

• Encourage client to talk about whatever comes to mind
• Encourage client to talk about childhood experiences
• Help client to acquires the freedom to love, work and play
• Assist client in achieving self awareness
• Pay attention to both what is spoken and what is unspoken, listen for
gaps and inconsistencies in the client’s story, infer the meaning of
reported dreams and free associations and remain sensitive to clues
concerning the client’s feeling towards the therapist
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Psychoanalytic Therapy Can Help With

• Anxiety
• Depression
• Emotion struggles or trauma
• Identity problems
• Self-esteem issues
• Self-assertion
• Psychosomatic disorders
• Relationship issues
• Self-destructive behaviour
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Psychoanalytical Techniques
• Free Association
• Dream Analysis
• Analysis of transference
• Analysis of resistance
• Interpretation
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Jung’s Approach
Theoretical assumptions:
• This is analytical approach
• It is form of talk therapy
• This therapy helps in improving life of people who suffered
from depression, anxiety, grief, phobias and low self esteem.
• This therapy focus more on sources of the problems rather
their manifestation
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Structure of Personality:
The Ego
Personal Unconscious
Collective unconscious
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Archetypes
Archetypes are images and themes which have universal
meanings across cultures which may show up in dreams,
literature, art or religion.
• Self
• Persona
• The Anima/Animus
• The Shadow
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Psychological types
• Classified people as extravert or introvert according to their
attitude towards the life.
• Four functions operate the psyche, and these are grouped
into two pairs of opposite
Thinking – feeling
Intuition – sensation
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Techniques
• WAT
• Dream Analysis
• Exploring symbolic meaning of the emotions
• Active imagination
• Creative Activities
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Adlerian therapy
Alfred Adler (1870 – 1937) was the founder of Adlerian
approach to counselling, also known as Individual Psychology.
Individual psychology states that people are unaware of theirs
goals and of the logic that powers their progress towards their
goals.
Individual meant that a person is indivisible and can not be
divided into independent mental parts. Adler emphasize on
holistic approach.
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

• Private logic
• Lifestyle
• Goals
• Inferiority and superiority
• Mental Health and Social Interest
• Life task
• Birth Order
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Therapeutic Goals
• Form relationship based on mutual respect
• Lifestyle assessment or holistic psychological investigation which help to
disclose mistaken goals and faulty assumptions.
• Focus on re-education or reorientation of the client toward the useful side of life.
• Develop sense of belonging and assist in adoption of behaviour and processes
characterized by community feeling and social interest.
• The therapeutic process focuses on providing information, teaching, guiding and
offering encouragement to discouraged clients.
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

• Fostering social interest by helping clients connect with their responsibility to

their community.
• Helping clients overcome feelings of discouragement and inferiority
• Modifying clients’ lifestyle in the direction of more adaptive, flexible and social
• Changing faulty motivation
• Encouraging equality and acceptance of self and others.
• Helping people to become contributing members of the world community.
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Role of Therapist
• Comprehensive assessment of the functioning
• Gather information about the individual’s style of living by means of
a questionnaire on the client’s family constellation which includes
parents, siblings and other living in the home, life task and early
recollections.
• Early recollections are defined as stories of events that a person says
occurred before 10 years of age
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Therapeutic Techniques and procedure

• Establish the proper therapeutic relationship
• Explore the psychological dynamics operating in the client
• Encourage the development of self understanding
• Help the client to make new choices
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teQVYWrg41M
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Establish the relationship:

When clients come for therapy, they typically have diminished sense of self-worth
and self respect. They lack faith in their ability to cope with tasks of life, and they
often feel discouraged.
• Relationship is based on sense of interest that grows into caring, involvement and
friendship.
• Therapeutic efficacy is based on development of relationship.
• Therapist focus on person to person contact rather than starting with the problem.
• Therapist needs to help to client become aware about their assets and strengths
• Positive relationship is created by listening, responding, demonstrating respect
for client.
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Assessing the individual’s Psychological Dynamics:

Counsellor tries to get deeper understanding of an individual’s life style.
• This assessment phase proceeds from two interview forms: Subjective Interview
and objective interview
• In subjective interview, client is asked to tell his life story as complete as
possible. Empathetic listening and responding will allow client to feel completely
heard.
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

• Objective interview seeks to discover information about

How problems in the client’s life begin
Any precipitating events
A medical history
A social history
Reason to choose therapy
Individual’s coping with life task
A lifestyle assessment : lifestyle assessment starts with an investigation of the
individual’s family constellation and early childhood history.
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Encouraging Self understanding and Insight

• Self understanding is only possible when hidden purposes and goals of behaviour
are made conscious.
• Adlerian consider insight as a special form of awareness that facilitates a
meaningful understanding within therapeutic relationship and act as a foundation
for change.
• Interpretation deals with client’s underlying motives for behaving the way they
do in here and now.
• Adlerian disclosures and interpretations are concerned with creating awareness of
one’s direction in life, one’s goals and purposes, one’s private logic and how it’s
work.
• Open ended questions are used for interpretations.
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Reorientation and Re-education

• This phase focuses on helping clients discover a new or more functional
perspective.
• Clients are encouraged and challenged to develop the courage to take risk and
make changes in their life
• At this stage client adopt a new style of life, increase their community feeling,
and social interest.
• Reorientation involves shifting rules of interaction, process, and motivation.
• Encouragement means “to build courage”
• Encouragement is a process of increasing the courage needed for a person to face
difficulties in life.
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

• Confrontations
• Asking the “the questions”
• Encouragement
• Acting “as If”
• Task setting
• Push button
• Guided Imagery
• Role play
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Limitations:
• The Approach lack on firm and supportive research base.
• This approach is too optimistic about the human nature
• The approach, which relies heavily on verbal education, logic and
insight may be limited in its applicability to clients who are not
intellectual bright.
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Client Centred Therapy

Rogers formulated the theory in the form of non directive
psychotherapy in 1942.
The theory latter evolved into client centred and person centred
counselling.
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

View of Human nature

• People are essentially good.
• Humans are characteristically positive, forward moving,
constructive, realistic and trustworthy
• Each person is aware, inner directed and moving toward self
actualisation.
• The organism has basic tendency and striving to actualize,
maintain, and enhance the experiencing organism
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

• The actualizing tendency is a directional process of striving toward

realization, fulfilment, autonomy and self determination.
• Individual form phenomenological perspective which states that
perception of individual about reality is important than event itself in
reality.
• Self
• Real Self
• Ideal Self
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Goals
• Individual need to be assisted in learning how to cope with
situation
• Help the client to become fully functioning person so that
individual ready to bring changes and grow
• A client is helped to identify, use, and integrate his or her
own resources
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Role of Counsellor
• Counsellor promote a climate in which client is free and encouraged to explore
all the aspects of self
• Atmosphere focus on relationship between counsellor and client
• The counsellor will be aware about verbal and nonverbal language of client and
counsellor reflect back what he or she is listening or observing
• Neither the client nor the counsellor knows what direction the session will take or
what goals will emerge in the process.
• The counsellor’s job is to work as facilitator rather than a director.
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Techniques:
No basic techniques are practiced person centred therapy
Quality of counselling relationship is much more important than
techniques:
• Presence: accepting, respecting, listening, understanding and
responding with honest expression
• Congruence or genuine
• Unconditional positive regard and acceptance
• Accurate empathetic understanding
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

• Immediacy: addressing what is going on between the client and therapist

Limitations:
• This approach is very simplistic and optimistic
• The approach depends on bright, insightful, and hardworking clients for best
results
• The approach ignore diagnosis, the unconscious, developmental theories, and
innately generated sexual and aggressive drive.
• The approach deals only with surface issues and does not challenge the client to
explore deeper areas. Because it is short term and it may not make permanent
impact on the person.
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Existentialism
• The word existence is derived from the Latin ‘existere’. Meaning of
this term is ‘to stand out’ ‘to emerge’.
• Existence involves the process of coming into being or becoming .
• This approach is aimed to enable clients to affirm their existence or
stand out.
• It looks beyond the surface problems and helps clients to face basic
issues of their existence including loneliness, despair, and
meaninglessness
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Theoretical assumptions
Being and Non being:
• Human beings have the capacity of self consciousness and can
therefore choose their own being.
• The human sense of being refers to the whole experience of existence,
both conscious and unconscious
• They need to have a basic ‘I am experience’ or ‘since I am, I have a
right to be’
• Being is threatened by anxiety, conformity, lack of self awareness and
physical sickness
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Anxiety:
May defined anxiety as ‘the threat to our existence’ or to value we
identify with our existence.
Ultimate existential concern:
Death, Freedom and Isolation
• Interpersonal Isolation: Loneliness caused by psychopathology
• Intrapersonal isolation: awareness of individual is blocked
• Existential isolation: unbridgeable gap between ourselves and others
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Meaninglessness:
We needs purpose, significance and meaning in life. We organise
random stimuli into figure and ground, seeking pattern and meaning.

A fundamental quest for humans is to find meaning in indifferent world

that has no meaning
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Existential Counselling:
There will be great emphasis on authentic counsellor and client
relationship
Clients are encouraged to experience their existence as real.
• Clients are helped to understand their inner conflicts
• Clients are confronted with the idea that everyone is responsible for
his or her own life
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Logo therapy
Logotherapy gets its name from the Greek logos which can be translated
as both meaning and sprit
Logotherapy focus on will for meaning
As human being we have freedom of will. Human can only with the
ability to be self detached and to reflect on and judge the choice we
make.
We are free to shape our character and we are responsible for what we
make of our self.
The will for meaning is our fundamental motivational force and thought
our lives we are faced with the need to find meaning.
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

• Conscious and unconscious

Search for meaning involve both conscious and unconscious activity.
Meaning:
The meaning of Life:
As a human being we are different, responsible and conscious.
Responsibility is cornerstone of human existence.
Freedom as human beings means the freedom to accept responsibility.
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Self transcendence:
Self transcendence is basic characteristic of human existence. We
transcend our self by encountering other person loving or fulfilling
meaning.
Self transcendence can be attained by finding meaning in three ways:
Meaning in work
Meaning in love
Meaning in suffering
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

The existential vacuum:

Existential Frustration
Meaninglessness
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Counselling:
Dealing with existential vacuum
• Finding meaning
• Taking responsibility
• Listening to personal conscience
• Widening horizons in respect to source of meaning
Paradoxical intention