Classical Psychoanalysis

Theory: Classical Psychoanalysis
 
Theorist: Sigmund Freud

Focus: Psychoanalysis concerns the functioning of the mind. It refers to a specific type of treatment where the therapist, upon hearing the thoughts of the patient, formulates and then explains the unconscious basis for the patient's symptoms and character problems. During psychoanalytic treatment, the patient tells the therapist various thoughts and feelings. The counselor listens carefully, formulates, and then intervenes to attempt to help the patient develop insight into unconscious factors causing the problems. This type of therapy is helpful for phobias, hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and abnormalities of character that replaced these mental disorders. The most common defense mechanisms include denial, displacement, projection, reaction formation, undoing, introjection, rationalization, regression, and sublimation. (Austad, 2009)

Strengths: Patient works through his or her major conflicts. The patient understands more about his or her self-defeating habits and immature defenses, has freed up cathected libido, and can channel their anxiety into a more mature character structure.

Weakness: The length of therapy for this type of treatment is long. To be effective, the patient and therapist could meet 4-5 times a week for 4-7 years. I do not think there are many people who could commit to that much time in therapy.

Techniques Used: Assessment and diagnosis aims at determining if a person has a sufficient ego to tolerate therapy as well as the capacity to benefit from the therapy. The psychoanalyst is a neutral authority figure. Therapeutic techniques include free association, and interpretations of resistance, transference, defenses and symptoms, and dream analysis. (Austad, 2009) The specifics of the therapist's interventions typically include confronting and clarifying the patient's pathological defenses, wishes and guilt. Through the analysis of resistance (unconscious barriers to treatment), and transference to the analyst of expectations, psychoanalysis aims to unearth wishes and emotions from prior unresolved conflicts, in order to help the patient perceive and resolve lingering problems.

Personal example: In the preschool that I teach at there are a good number of children that are adopted from other countries. I had a little boy adopted from Russia that had been in an orphanage. He did not get held or touched when being feed as an infant. As a preschooler he showed signs of anxiety and had a low frustration level. According to Freud, his libidinal energy suffered during the oral stage of development. 

References:

Austad, C. (2009). Counseling and Psychotherapy Today, New York: The McGraw-Hill

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