Counseling and helping relationships Flashcards
How do you distinguish between crisis counseling and therapy?
Crisis counseling has the goal of returning the person to their original functioning prior to the tragedy or counseling. Crisis counseling and therapy, however, both deal with issues that go beyond the factors surrounding a crisis.
Who is Alfred Adler?
Adler was the father of individual psychology.
Who is Josef Breuer?
Bruer was a Viennese neurologist who taught Freud the value of the talking cure, which is also termed catharsis.
Who is A. A. Brill?
Brill’s name is associated with the impact Freudian theory has on career choice.
Who is Rollo May?
A prime mover in the existential counseling movement.
What is Eric Berne’s transactional analysis (TA?)
Transactional analysis posits 3 ego states: the Child, the Adult, and the Parent. These roughly corresped to Freud’s structural theory of the id, ego, and superego. In TA, the Child, Adult, and Parent are hypothetical constructs used to explain the function of the personality. This, like Freud’s id, ego, and superego, is considered a structural theory.
What is Freud’s topographic notion of the mind?
This is Freud’s conception of the unconscious, preconscious, and conscious. This relates to Freud’s topographic notion that the mind has depth like an iceburg.
In transactional analysis, which construct is concerned with moral behavior?
The parent - this maps to Freud’s superego. In this frame, if a child has nurturing parents, he is said to develop “nurturing parent” qualities such as being nonjudgemental and sympathetic to others. The Parent ego state, however, can be filled with prejudicial or crucial messages. people in this category can be intimidating, bossy, or know-it-alls. Someone whose caretaker died or left at an early age might be plagued with what TA called an “incomplete parent”. That person may expect others to parent him through life or might use lack of parenting as an excuse for bad behavior.
What is transference
A psychoanalytic concept that implies that the client displaces emotion felt toward a parent or other major figure onto the therapist.
How do Freudians conceptualize the ego?
As the executive administrator of the personality and as the reality principle.
What is the id?
The id is present at birth and never matures. It operates outside of awareness to satisfy instinctual needs according to the pleasure principle – suggesting humans desire an instinctual gratification of libido, sex, or the elimination of hunger and thirst.
Which of Freud’s structural concepts is the balancing apparatus between the 3 parts of the self?
The ego. Freud felt that the ego attempts to balance the id (pleasure principle) and the superego (conscience)
What is free association?
This is when the client says whatever comes to mind, even if it seems silly or embarrassing. In classical analysis, the client lays on the couch and free associates. This is the antithesis of directive approaches to counseling when clients are asked to discuss certain material.
What does the superego strive for?
The superego strives for perfection or the ego ideal. The superego is more concerned with the ideal and personal aspirations than what is real and is composed of the values, morals, and ideals of parents, caretakers, and society.
Who is Joseph Wolpe?
He developed a paradigm known as systematic desensitization which is useful when trying to weaken a client’s response to anxiety-producing stimuli.
What is systematic desensitization?
This is a form of behavior therapy, created by Joseph Wolpe, based on Pavlov’s classical conditioning that weakens a client’s response to anxiety-provoking stimuli. Other treatment modalities derived from classical conditioning are assertiveness training, flooding, implosive therapy, and sensate focus. The client and therapist create a SUDS (subjective units of disturbance scale) to rank situations from least to most threatening.
What kind of content did Freud believe dreams have?
Manifest (content of the dreams) and latent (hidden meaning). In therapy dream work consists of deciphering the hidden meaning of the dream so the individual can be aware of unconscious motives, impulses, desires, and conflicts.
What is insight in psychoanalysis?
This is the process of making a client aware of something previously unknown. This increases self-knowledge and is often described as a sudden, novel understanding of a problem.
what is resistance in psychoanalysis?
The client who is resistant will be reluctant to bring unconscious ideas into the conscious mind. Nonanalytic counselors use the term more loosely to describe clients who are resisting the helping process in any manner.
What is the Little Albert case?
Little Albert was a famous case associated with the work of John Broadus Watson who pioneered American behaviorism. In 1920, Watson and his wife conditioned a 9 year old boy named Albert to be afraid of furry objects. First he was exposed to a white rat that he was not scared of but Watson and Rayer created a loud noise each time the child got near the animal which created a conditioned fear in the child. This has been used to demonstrate that fears are learned rather than the result of an unconscious process.
What was the case of Anna O
Anna O was considered the first psychoanalytic patient . She was a patient of Freud’s colleague Josef Breuer and suffered from hysteria. She would remember painful events in hypnosis that she couldn’t remember while away. Freud became disenchanted w/hynosis but this led to his basic premise of psychoanalysis – that techniques that could produce cathartic material were highly therapeutic.
What is the case of Hans?
Has is often used to contrast behavior therapy (Little Albert) with psychoanalysis. It reflects data in Freud’s 1909 paper in which a child’s fear of going into the streets and possibly having a horse bite him were explained using psychoanalytic concepts like the Oedipus conflict and castration anxiety. This is reflective of a psychoanalytic paradigm of thought.
What is the case of Daniel Paul Schreber?
This has been called the “most frequently quoted case in modern psychiatry”. In 1903, Schreber, after spending 9 years in a mental hospital wrote a memoir which Freud got his hands on and published about. Schreber’s major delusion was that he would be transformed into a woman, become God’s mate, and produce a healthier mate. Freud felt that he might be struggling with unconscious issues of homosexuality.
What is psychodynamic therapy vs. classical analysis?
Analysis is quite lengthy - 3-5 sessions per week for several years - and is expensive. Psychodynamic therapy make use of analytic principles (the unconscious mind, etc) but rely on fewer sessions per week to make it more practical. Psychodynamic therapists dispense with the couch and sit face-to-face.
What is catharsis and/or abreaction?
The curative process of talking about difficulties in order to purse emotions and feelings. Sometimes “catharsis” is used to connote a mild purging of emotion and “abreaction” when the outburst is very powerful and violent. Freud and Breuer originally use the term to describe highly charged repressed emotions released during the hypnotic process.
What is reflection of emotional content and accurate empathy?
These are techniques heavily emphasized in Rogerian, client-centered (now called person-centered) therapy. Rogerians do not emphasize diagnosis or giving advice.
where does evidence of the unconscious mind come from?
Hypnosis, slips of the tongue (parapraxis) and humor, and dreams.
What is the Subjective Units of Disturbance Scale (SUDS)?
This is a concept used in forming a hierarchy to perform Wolpe’s systematic densensitization. The SUDS is created via the process of introspection by rating the anxiety associated with the situation. Generally the scale most counselors use is 0-100 with 100 being the most threatening situation.
What is the preconscious mind?
The conscious mind is aware of the immediate environment whereas the preconscious mind is capable of bringing ideas, images, and thoughts into awareness with minimal difficulty. The preconscious can access information from the conscious as well as the unconscious mind.
What is the unconscious mind?
The unconscious mind is composed of material which is normally unknown or hidden from the client
What are ego defense mechanisms?
Unconscious processes which serve to minimize anxiety and protect the self from severe id or superego demands. The id strives for immediate satisfaction while the superego is ready and willing to punish the ego via guilt if the id is allowed to act on such impulses. This creates tension and pressure within the personality. The ego controls the tension and relieves anxiety by utilizing ego defense mechanisms. Simply put, ego defense mechanisms are unconscious strategies which distort reality and are based on self-deception to protect our self-image.
According to Freudians, what is the most important form of ego defense mechanism?
Repression. A child who is sexually abused, for example, may repress (I.e. truly forget) the incident. In later life, the repression that served to protect the person and helped her through the event can cause emotional problems. Psychoanalytically trained counselors can help the client recall the repressed memory and make it conscious so they can deal with it.
What is reaction formation
This is a defense mechanism in which a person can’t accept a given impulse in themselves and so act in the opposite way (I.e. Asa can’t tolerate being called a baby or a person who is obsessed w/stamping out pornography but who is unconsciously involved in it so he can look at the material). The person acts the opposite way of how they actually feel.
What is denial?
Denial is a defense mechanism that is similar to repression except it’s a conscious act. An individual who says, “I refuse to think about it” is displaying suppression and denial
What is sublimation?
This is when a person acts out an unconscious impulse in a socially acceptable way. I.e. a very aggressive person may become a football player.
How does suppression differ from repression?
repression is automatic or involuntary
What is rationalization
This is an intellectual excuse to minimize hurt feelings - I.e. “I’m glad I didn’t get good grades, only nerds get good grades”
What is displacement?
This is a defense mechanism that occurs when an impulse is unleashed at a safe target. The prototypical example is when someone is furious with his boss so he comes home and kicks the dog.
What is introjection?
This is a defense mechanism in which a child accepts a parent’s, caretaker’s, or significant other’s values as his own – I.e. a sexually abused child may attempt to sexually abuse other kids. Sometimes introjection causes the person to accept an aggressor’s values - I.e. a prisoner of war might incorporate the value system of the enemy.
What is identification?
This is a defense mechanism which results when a person identifies with a cause or successful person with the unconscious hope that she will be perceived as worthwhile. OR that identification with the other serves to lower the fear or anxiety towards that person.
What is a type II error?
This is a statistical term which means that a researcher has accepted a null hypothesis (I.e. that there is no difference between an experimental and control group) when it is false.
What is sour grapes rationalization?
It’s a type of rationalization (an intellectual reasoning that supports the outcome you got) known as “I didn’t really want it anyways”
What is the “sweet lemon” version of rationalization?
It is a form of rationalization in which a person tells you how wonderful a distasteful set of circumstances really is.
What is organ inferiority?
This is a term usually associated with Alfred Adler who pioneered a theory known as individual psychology. It refers to the sense of being deficient or somehow less than others as a result of negative feelings about any type of real or imagined abnormality of organ function or structure. It is interesting to note that Adler was a very sickly child. For him, the major psychological goal is to escape deep-seated feelings of inferiority.
What is projection?
This is a defense mechanism in which someone attributes unacceptable qualities of his or her own to others.
What is compensation?
This is a defense mechanism when someone tries to overdevelop a positive trait to make up for a limitation. The person secretly hopes that others will focus on the positives rather than the negative factors.
What is one of the biggest criticisms of Freud’s work?
That many aspects of his theory or difficult to test or measured.
What is the totem?
Freud’s concept of an object that represents a family or a group. He wrote about it on the totem, the taboo, and the dread of incest. Freud felt that even primitive people feared incestuous relationships and that the dread of incest is not merely instilled by modern societies.
What is the purpose of interpretation in therapy?
To make clients aware of their unconscious behaviors.
What is Individual Psychology?
In individual psychology, created by Alfred Adler, the term “individual” refers to the unique qualities we each possess. Individual psychology is keen on analyzing organ inferiority and methods in which the individual attempts to compensate for it. It is interesting to note that Adler was a very sickly child. For him, the major psychological goal is to escape deep-seated feelings of inferiority.
Who is Wolfgang Kohler?
Wolfgang Kohler is a gestalt psychologist who spent time at the turn of the century on the island of Tenerife where he studied chimps and apes. He showed moments of insight (I.e. figuring out new solutions) in the apes and called them and “insight experience”.
What are the 3 types of learning?
- Reinforcement - operant conditioning
- Association - classical conditioning
- Insight
What are Carl Jung’s concepts of Logos and Eros?
Logos implies logic while eros refers to intuition.
What is a transference neurosis?
When a client is attached to their therapist as if he or she is a substitute parent.
What is countertransference?
When the counselor’s strong feelings or attachment to the client are strong enough to hinder the treatment process.
What is the Jungian term “mandala”?
Jung, the father of analytic psychology, borrowed the term “mandala’ from Hindu writings. In Jung’s writings, the mandala can stand for a magic protective circle that represented self-unification. He used these drawings balanced around a center point to analyze himself, his clients, and dreams.
What is eidetic imagery?
This is the ability to remember the most minute details of a scene or picture for an extended period of time. This ability is usually gone by the time a child reaches adolescence.
What drive did Adler emphasize?
The drive for superiority. Adler initially felt that aggressive drives were responsible for most human behavior, then altered it saying it was the “will to power” then finally altered it and said it was the striving for superiority or a thirst to perfection.
Who are the constructivist therapists?
Newer constructivist theories stress that it is imperative that we as helpers understand the client’s view (also known as constructs) to explain his or her problems. Two popular types of constructivist therapy include:
- brief therapy - examines what worked for a client in the past
- narrative therapy - looks at stories in the client’s life and attempts to rewrite or reconstruct the stories when necessary
What did Adler believe about sibling relationships?
Adler believed that sibling interactions might have more impact than parent-child interactions.
Adler broke with Freud in 1911 and went on to found a number of child guidance clinics where he was able to observe children’ behavior directly, thus countering one of the biggest criticisms of Freud which is that his theories were not based on extensive research or observations of children’ behavior
In contrast with Freud, what did the Neo-Freudians emphasize?
The Neo-Freudians emphasized social factors. Neo Freudians such as Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, Erik Erikson, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Erich Fromm stressed the importance of cultural (social) issues and interpersonal (social) relations.
What is a baseline?
This is a behaviorist term that indicates the frequency that a behavior is manifested prior to or without treatment.
What is unconditional positive regard?
This is a concept popularized by Carl Rogers who felt that the counselor must care for the client even when the counselor is uncomfortable or disagrees with the client’s position. The counselor accepts the client just as he is.
What do Jung’s terms of introversion and extroversion mean?
Introversion meant a turning in of the libido. Thus an introverted individual is his or her primary source of pleasure. Such a person will shy away from social settings.
Extroversion is the tendency to find satisfaction and pleasure in other people. The extrovert seeks external rewards.
Whose work are the Myers Briggs’s personality types based on?
Carl Jung.
This test, given to millions of people each year, is based on Volume 6 of Jung’s collected works from the 1920s. The measure is used to assess people 12+ and looks at 4 bipolar scales: Introversion vs. extroversion, sensing (current perception) vs. intuition (future abstractions and possibilities), thinking vs. feeling and judging (organizing and controlling the outside world) vs. perceiving (observing events:
Who is Rudolph Dreikurs?
Dreikers was a student of Adler’s who was the first to discuss the use of group therapy in private practice. He also introduced Adlerian principles to the treatment of children in a school setting.
What is the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)?
It is a projective test in which the client is shown a series of pictures an asked to tell a story. This test was introduced in Henry Murray’s 1938 work, “explorations in personality”. Murray called the study of personality personology.
Who created the hierarchy of needs?
Abraham Maslow
What is Adler’s theory of social connectedness?
Adler believed that people wish to belong and that we all need each other. This is his theory of social connectedness.
What is the collective unconscious?
This is a term coined by Jung that implies all humans have “collected” universal, inherited unconscious neural patterns.
What are paradoxical techniques and who are they associated with?
Adler was one of the first therapists who relied on paradox. Paradoxical techniques are also associated with the work of Victor Frankl who pioneered logo therapy, a form of existential treatment.
Paradoxical strategies often seem to defy logic as the client is instructed to intensify or purposely engage in the maladaptive behavior. Paradoxical interventions are often the direct antithesis of common sense. these methods have become very popular with family therapists due to the work of Jay Haley and Milton Erikson. Currently this technique is popular with family therapists who believe it reduces a family’s resistance to change.
What is the material that makes up Jung’s collective unconscious?
archetypes. An archetype is a primal universal symbol which means the same thing to all men and women (I.e. the cross). Jung perused literature and found that certain archetypes have appeared in fables, myths, dreams, and religious writings since the beginning of recorded history.
What are some common archetypes?
- The persona -the mask or role with present to others to hide our true self
- animus, anima, and self
- Shadow - the mask behind the persona with contains id-like material (denied yet desired). The shadow represents the unconscious opposite of the individual’s conscious expression. (I.e. a shy person may have recurring dreams of being outgoing, verbal, etc). The nature of shadow is also evident when someone engages in projection. The clinical assumption is that projection will decrease and individuation will increase when therapy renders shadow behaviors conscious
What is confrontation?
Confrontation is when a counselor points something out to a client
What is accurate empathy?
This occurs when a counselor is able to experience the client’s point of view in terms of feelings and cognitions. Empathy is a subjective understanding of the client in the here and now. Empathy deals with the client’s perception rather than your own.
What is summarization?
This is whenever a counselor brings together the ideas discussed during a period of dialog.
What is ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy)?
ACT is a mindfulness-based behavior therapy that is not focused on symptom reduction. ACT wants clients to take effective action in their lives. The goal is to perceive feelings and thoughts as harmless, albeit uncomfortable. According to ACT, most of us will experience psychological suffering as a result of our own mental process. Therapy is aimed at helping clients stop struggling with their private experiences and assist them in taking action towards the life they want. ACT suggest that struggling with negative feelings makes them worse.
What is symptom substitution?
This is a psychoanalytic concept that says if you merely deal with a symptom, another symptom will manifest itself since the real conscious is in the unconscious mind. By contrast, behaviorists strive for symptom reduction and do not believe in the concept of symptom substitution.
Which clinician is most associated with eclectic therapy?
Frederick C. Thorne. Thorne felt true eclecticism was more than a hodgepodge of facts and rather needed to be rigidly scientific. He preferred the term psychological case handling rather than psychotherapy as he felt that the efficacy of psychotherapy had not been adequately proven.
What is cognitive dissonance?
Cognitive dissonance refers to the way in which humans feel quite uncomfortable if they have two incompatible or inconsistent beliefs and thus the person will be motivated to reduce the dissonance.
What did Adler believe about lifestyle, birth order, and family constellation?
Adlerians believe that our lifestyle is a predictable self-fulfilling prophecy based on our psychological feelings about ourselves. He stressed the importance of birth order in the family (I.e. a firstborn could be dethroned by a later child and could thus be prone to feelings of inferiority). Firstborns often go to great lengths to please their parents. A second child will often try to compete with a firstborn and often surpasses the first child’s performance and a middle child often feels he or she is being treated unfairly and can be seen as quite manipulative. The youngest child or baby can be pampered or spoiled but often excel by mimicking the older children’ behavior.
What kinds of questions might an Adlerian ask?
Adlerians stress the clients long for a feeling of belonging and strive for perfection. Adlerians, like REBT practiociners, are didactic and use homework assignments. Adler might ask, “what would life be like if you were functioning in an ideal manner?” Then the counselor asks the client to act as if he or she didn’t have the problem.
How does logo therapy relate to existentialist?
Existentialism is a philosophy and logo therapy is a type of psychology which great out of the philosophy of existentialism.
What is associates?
This is a theory that ideas are held together with associations. This philosophy led to the development of behaviorism.
What is Edward Thorndike’s law of effect?
The law of effect simple asserts that responses accompanied by satisfaction will be repeated while those that produce unpleasantness will be stamped out. This was an initial theory that BF Skinner’s behaviorism elaborated on.
What was Arnold Lazarus’s concept of BASIC-ID?
Lazarus worked very closely with Joseph Wlope and Wolpe’s multimodal approach. Although it was very holistic, it has a strong behavioral treatment slant. When practicing multimodal therapy, the counselor focuses on 7 key modalities or areas of the client’s functioning:
- B - Behavior including acts, habits, and reactions
- A - Affective responses such as emotions, feelings, and mood
- S - sensation including hearing, touch, sight, smell, and taste
- I - Interpersonal relationships
- D - Drugs (including alcohol, legal, illegal, and prescription and diet)
Who was Ivan Pavlov?
Pavlov’s work relates to classical conditioning. He won a Nobel prize for his work o
What is the Minnesota Viewpoint?
This is an approach, created by EG Williamson, that attempts to match a client’s trait with a career. This is often also called the trait-factor approach.
What is a conditioned stimulus?
A conditioned stimulus is an association that is learned. An association that naturally exists, like animal salivation is known as an unconditioned response (UR or UCR).
Some may refer to the CS as the NS or neural stimulus and the UCS as the reinforcing or charged stimulus.
What is the acquisition period?
The acquisition period refers to the time it takes to learn or acquire a given behavior.
What is another name for Skinner’s operant conditioning?
Instrumental learning. (Skinner’s last name has an “I” just like “instrumental”)
What is respondent behavior?
Reflexes. This relates to the theoretical notions of Pavlovian conditioning. Pavlov’s theory involves mainly reflexes, like when a dog salivates.
What are reinforcers
Reinforcers–both positive AND negative–are things that raise the probability that an antecedent (prior) behavior will occur. In a situation with positive reinforcement, something is added following an operant behavior. It’s possible to use positive reinforcers to reduce or eliminate an undesirable target behavior - I.e if a healthy alternative behavior is positively reinforced.
In the case of negative reinforcement something aversive is taken away after the behavior occurs. (I.e. if you do what you’re told I’ll stop that loud noice). Plastic tokens can be used as secondary reinforcers which reinforce by association. (I.e. a plastic token could be exchanged for a trip to a baseball game, etc)
Is negative reinforcement the same thing as punishment?
No. Negative reinforcement is not punishment. All reinforcers raise or strengthen the probability that a behavior will occur and punishment lowers the probability that a behavior will occur. In the case of a negative reinforcer, it generally provides relief. I.e. if you take a pill and it removes pain, you are more likely to take it the next time you are in pain because it gave you relief.
What is punishment
Punishment is something that decreases the probability that a behavior will occur. Behavior modifiers value reinforcement over punishment. William Glasser, father of reality therapy, lists 8 steps for effective treatment and step 7 is to not punish.
What is the most effective time interval between the CS (conditioned stimulus) and UCS (unconditioned stimulus)?
.5 or half a second. As the interval exceeds half a second, more trials are needed for effective conditioning. And the conditioned stimulus (CS - I.e. the bell) ALWAYS comes before the unconditioned stimulus (UCS - I.e. the meat that caused dogs to salivate). In this example, the meat is also the reinforcer – the thing that encourages the behavior of salivation.
What is delay conditioning?
When the CS is delayed until the UCS occurs
What is trace conditioning?
When the CS terminates before the occurrence of the US (I.e. if the bell had stopped ringing by the time the meat came out). Hint: trace begins with T and so does “termination”
What happens when the UCS (I.e. the meat) comes before the CS (I.e. the bell)?
This typically results in no conditioning. When you arrange things in this way, conditioning just doesn’t work. This is called backward conditioning and is ineffective and doesn’t work. Also, if the bell and the meat are presented at the exact same time, this is called simultaneous conditioning and conditioning also does not occur under these circumstances.
What is Stimulus generalization?
Stimulus generalization, or what Pavlov deemed irradiation or also called second-order conditioning occurs when a similar stimulus to the CS produces the same reaction as the CS itself.
Which is a more powerful, a conditioned response (CR) or unconditioned response (UCR)?
An unconditioned response. In an experiment like Pavlov’s, even though the dog would learn to salivate when he hears a bell, the response to salivate when he sees meat will still be more powerful. And the response we see in stimulus generalization is weaker than the response produced by the original conditioning.
What is stimulus discrimination?
This is the opposite of stimulus generalization, in which the learning process is fine tuned to respond to only specific stimulus. This is also referred to as stimulus differentiation.
What is experimental neurosis?
Pavlov termed the phenomenon when you are trying to get the subject to differentiate between nearly indistinguishable stimuli and the subject shows signs of emotional disturbance. I.e. “stop, you’re driving this dog crazy”
What is extinction?
Extinction is when the UCS happens but is no longer paired with the CS - then the association will disappear. This is classical extinction which is different than operant extinction. Sometimes, however, the association will reappear if, after extincition, the CS is reintroduced. This is called spontaneous recovery.
In Skinnerian or operant conditioning, extinction connotes that reinforcement is withheld and eventually the behavior will be extinguished.
Example: 6 year old sticks out her tongue at counselor, counselor is obviously ignoring the behavior (disconnecting the UCS - tongue - from the CS - the reaction). Ignoring behavior, like time out, is a common example of extinction.