Midterm 1 Flashcards
What’s Zeitgeist and how does it apply to psychotherapy?
- German word
- ‘Spirit of the times’
- Application: dominant form of psychotherapy has changed over time and it has depended on what is going on at the time in the culture
What are some contextual considerations to understand how the form of psychotherapy has changed overtime?
- What’s believed to be the cause of psychological problems? (etiology)
- Who is thought to be qualified to perform psychotherapy? (initially only psychiatrists performing psychotherapy, now usually a psychologist or another mental health professional)
- Can we use the scientific method to understand human behaviour? (resulted in major change in types of psychotherapies considered evidence-based -> have they been studied using research methods?)
- Can we study psychotherapy using the scientific method? (or is it too complex?)
What were the early treatment traditions prior to the 19th century?
- Individuals with mental illness considered troublesome and were treated as they needed to be removed from society
- No hope that people especially with severe forms of mental illness would recover or be able to live a normal life
- Result: hospitals where people were treated no different than prisoners (animal tradition)
- Dark time in history with treatment of people with psychological conditions
What’s the animal tradition?
- People with mental illness were seen as animals and put in hospitals where people could visit and pay a penny (the “penny show”) to watch them locked up
- Equivalent to today’s zoos
What were the early treatment traditions during the 19th century?
- Moral treatment
- Realization that prior treatments were inhumane -> increase in moral treatments
- Moral treatments: “warm and trusting familial environment where patients could feel that their mental condition didn’t preclude participation in normal human activities”
- Idea that if you put people in relaxing environment and where they feel like they’re contributing something to the “mini society”, that this might help improve their mental health
- Led to development of a different type of asylum with large castle-like structures that had ballrooms for socializing, gardens where they could work (everyone had a job)
- Hope that this would allow patients to live a more normal life but still be treated within an in-patient environment
- Some of these were used for psychological treatment up until the 1980s (ex: Athens asylum in Ohio)
What was the first formal psychotherapy?
- Psychoanalysis
- In all of the prior types of treatments, there wasn’t any psychotherapy involved
- People were being treated in locked units and mostly with medication
Describe Sigmund Freud
- From Austria
- Trained as a neurologist because at that time there was no psychiatry
- Established 1st private psychotherapy practice (practicing out of an office rather than in a hospital setting)
- Published multiple books
- Early works: Hysteria (1895) & Interpretation of Dreams
(1900) - The way his work became publicized -> invited by G. Stanley Hall to US in 1908 where he discussed case of Anna O and as a result, lots of his work was translated into English and there became this interest in the US and in North America in terms of psychoanalysis becoming a dominant practice and it became more widespread than what was happening just in Europe
- Consequently, professional societies, journals, and training institutes on psychoanalysis developed in US
Describe Freud’s work on Hysteria
His work was attributed to the wandering uterus and mostly as a result seen in females
Describe the Anna O case
- Anna O was diagnosed with hysteria
- She thought she had some physical symptoms but it was decided that she had a psychological problem
What were Freud’s major contributions with psychoanalysis?
- Drive Theory
- Levels of consciousness
- Personality structure
- Psychosexual stages of development
- Defense mechanisms
- Therapy techniques
- Therapy processes
- Most of these don’t really translate into current day psychotherapy and didn’t stick around
Describe Freud’s Drive theory
- According to Freud, everything comes down to sexual instincts
- As he got older, he acknowledged that there’s also an instinct to avoid death and to do anything to avoid knowing about your mortality and facing your mortality
Describe Freud’s Levels of Consciousness theory
- Unconscious, pre-conscious and conscious
- Psychoanalysis was trying to get to the unconscious (what people weren’t aware of)
Describe Freud’s Personality Structure theory
- Id, Ego, Superego
- Relates to the Id and the Superego and the Ego in between trying to mediate
Describe Freud’s Psychosexual Stages of Development theory
- Oral stage: toddlers putting everything in their mouths
- Anal stage: going through potty training
- Phallic stage: when kids become aware of their genitals
- Latency
- Genital stage: going through puberty and becoming aware of the opposite/same sex and of sexual instincts
Describe Freud’s Defense Mechanisms
- Repression: preventing thoughts from coming into your consciousness
- Denial
How much of Freud’s therapy techniques do we see in today’s psychotherapy practices?
- We see little of the types of techniques that Freud used in psychoanalysis in current psychotherapy
- Ex: free association (just saying what comes to your mind), dream analysis (asking people to describe their dreams, free form and try to find connections there)
What types of techniques from Freud’s psychoanalysis have persisted in our thinking of psychotherapy?
- The discussion that Freud had about psychotherapy processes related to transference and counter-transference
- This is a pre-cursor to our modern day understanding of the psychotherapy relationship and how it’s an intimate relationship with another person and there can be feelings projected onto the other person in the form of transference and counter-transference
- This emphasized that we need to understand the relationship between these two people in this psychotherapy context
What’s transference?
When the client feels a certain way about their therapist, perhaps based on past experiences, such as with their parents
What’s counter-transference?
When the therapist develops feelings (non-romantic) about their client related to certain behaviours that they might engage in
Who established the American Psychological Association (APA)?
- G. Stanley Hall (important figure)
- In 1892
- At the time the APA was dedicated towards research -> the science of psychology and not the practice of psychology
- The practice of psychology was under the purview of psychiatrists
Who was the first to use the term “clinical psychology”and the one who established the first psychological training clinic at the University of Pennsylvania?
- Lightner Witmer
- In 1896
- The first person to describe the development of a training clinic within a university
- Psychology research was being done within universities and he had this training clinic that most likely was being used for research as well as treatment purposes
- The current training model that a lot of different university clinical psychology programs use, including McGill, where you have a clinic embedded within the university and that’s where the students who are undergoing their training first see their clients and get the first initial experiences with providing psychotherapy or assessment
Psychologists were initially responsible for what instead of therapy?
- In the early 1900s, psychologists were initially doing things more related to assessment
- Ex: Intelligence testing -> intelligence assessments using the Wexler intelligence systems
- Ex: Personality testing
- They weren’t actually providing treatment
- Ex: during the wars, they were determining based on intelligence and personality, who would be a good candidate for a leadership position as opposed to a lower position in the army
What caused this shift for psychologists focusing only on assessment to start focusing on psychotherapy?
- When WW2 happened and a lot of soldiers came back with what they referred to at the time as “shell shock” (modern day PTSD) and it created an additional need for people doing psychotherapy
- That’s when psychologists who were traditionally interested in academic and research transitioned to being involved/interested in more practice-based issues
Describe Eysenck’s Critique of Psychotherapy
- Eysenck was a main academic psychologist involved in personality psychology
- In 1952, he published a paper called “The Effects of Psychotherapy: An Evaluation”
- He examined 19 studies
- All of these studies were either using psychoanalytic or eclectic psychotherapy
- All of the studies examined what they referred to as “neurotic” patients (equivalent to today’s depression/anxiety)
- They weren’t including studies where they were describing treatment of schizophrenia or psychosis or bipolar disorder
- A lot of limitations to this study when we think about it in terms of modern research methods -> but in 1952, it was a powerful study