Insight Therapy

4 Key excerpts on "Insight Therapy"

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  eBook - PDF

  Psychology and the Challenges of Life

  Adjustment and Growth

  • Spencer A. Rathus, Jeffrey S. Nevid(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  It seeks to help people develop insight (self-awareness) psychotherapy The systematic interaction between a therapist and a client that applies psychological principles to affect the client’s thoughts, feelings, or behavior in order to help the client overcome psychological disorders, adjust to problems in living, or achieve personal growth as an individual. psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud’s method of psychotherapy, which focuses on obtaining insight into the presumed unconscious roots of psychological problems. 404 CHAPTER 14 Therapies: Ways of Helping into the dynamic struggles occurring within the psyche between these mental states—conflicts that, in Freud’s view, were at the root of psychological problems such as anxiety and depression. Once these conflicts are brought into con- sciousness and worked through during the course of ther- apy, clients will be free of psychological symptoms and can pursue more adaptive behaviors. Traditional Psychoanalysis: “Where Id Was, There Shall Ego Be” If you consulted a traditional Freudian psychoanalyst, you would probably be asked to lie on a couch in a slightly dark- ened room. The therapist would sit behind you and encour- age you to talk about anything that comes to mind, no matter how trivial, no matter how personal. To avoid inter- fering with your self-exploration, the analyst might say little or nothing at all for session after session. A course of anal- ysis is likely to last for years, even many years. (See photo.) As developed by Freud, psychoanalysis aims to provide insight into the conflicts that are presumed to lie at the roots of a person’s problems. Freud was fond of saying, “Where id was, there shall ego be.” In part, he meant that psychoanalysis could shed the light of ego on the inner workings of the unconscious mind, the stage on which these unconscious conflicts are played out. He also sought to replace impulsive and defensive behavior with coping behav- ior.

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  The Modes And Morals Of Psychotherapy

  • Perry London(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  II

  THE HEALING MODES: Insight Therapy

     

  THE ARGUMENT

  Insight Therapy is what most people have in mind when they think of “going into” psychotherapy. Their statements about it may be vague, but their idea of what happens there is correct. They fancy psychotherapy is “talking to someone” in ways which help to understand what “makes” them the way they are, expecting that the understanding thus obtained will relieve their inner stress. In those two simple terms, they grasp the essence of Insight method and theory.

  The technical differences that separate Insight schools are not substantial things to lay people. Lying on a couch, sitting upright, saying all that comes to mind, crying, screaming, analyzing dreams, writing fairy tales, admonishing empty chairs, punching pillows, recalling childhood, are all subordinate parts of what they know to be the centerpiece of Insight Therapy–expanding consciousness.

  This increase takes place chiefly by talking, and to someone who does not reciprocate in kind, does not trade information and experience, and is not sociable or friendly in the usual sense, but selflessly attends the client's self. Insight therapists of different schools answer differently to what patients say and do, aiming at their attitudes, their histories, the contradictions of their self-perceptions or the hidden feelings and ideas which orchestrate the ones they show. All of these are tools for focusing attention on the patient's self, which learns to be responsible for its expressions in the session, as in life, and to treat the therapist impersonally as a mirror of itself, a projection screen for its own ghosts, an instrument to use in hot pursuit of consciousness.

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  Person-Centred Counselling Psychology

  An Introduction

  • Ewan Gillon(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  adaptation of unhealthy defences (i.e. challenging those which are dysfunctional or ‘immature’; Jacobs, 2005), rather than their elimination.

  Therapeutic approach

  There is considerable disagreement between therapeutic approaches within the psychodynamic paradigm and the person-centred approach in terms of the nature of psychological therapy and its role in enabling change within the client. From a psychodynamic perspective, psychological change is a product of increased conscious awareness of previously unconscious impulses, motivations and defences. This outcome is viewed as best enacted through the direct analytic input of the therapist, whose primary role is to guide the client toward a greater degree of awareness by offering ‘interpretations’ of her actions and experiences in terms of the unconscious processes motivating them.

  Due to the emphasis on the developmental basis of psychological difficulties, psychodynamic interpretations orientate around the links between past and present, highlighting, for example, how present day adult relationships are informed by childhood experiences. The therapeutic focus is thus very much on what Jacobs (2005) terms ‘the presenting past’, a focus which allows previously unconscious material (feelings, motivations and related forms of psychological defence etc.) to be brought into conscious awareness and attended to.

  Person-centred therapy, by contrast, adopts a very different therapeutic focus, exploring the client’s perceptions and experiences in the present moment , with no agenda to encourage an exploration of how these link to the past unless wished by the client. Indeed, understanding childhood experiences is not seen as necessarily relevant to the process of change, which is instead viewed as a product of deepened experiencing of organismic feelings in the present (Davy and Cross, 2004). Furthermore, rather than viewing therapy as a process reliant on the ‘interpretations’ provided by a therapist, the emphasis within the person-centred approach is on trusting the client to contact her own organismic experiencing within the context of a supportive, facilitative therapeutic relationship. Neither ‘classical’ and ‘experiential’ traditions see a place for any therapist-derived interpretations of ‘unconscious’ processes, preferring instead to work collaboratively with

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  Research in Counselling and Psychotherapy

  Practical Applications

  • Windy Dryden(Author)
  • 1996(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  The patient is to attend directly and with viv id focused concentration to that manifest, alive, real personality aspect, dimension, quality or part. 2 The patient is to show all the feelings toward that part, to have feelings fully and intensely, in an alive and real interaction with it. The direction of change is toward a greater sense of acceptance and welcoming of that part. How can you help promote insight, understanding, a new and better way of seeing things? Some studies seem to suggest that a substantive change in the core person is often followed by a change in the person's perspective on things. The guideline seems to be that if the person becomes a qualitatively new person, there is a consequent change in the way this new person sees him-or herself and the world; s/he has a different insight, a different way of understanding things, a new and better perspective. In other words, insight and under-standing follow a qualitative change in the person, rather than the traditional clinical axiom that holds that insight and understanding lead to therapeutic change. There is another way that we found. When the patient seems to have nicely pleasant feelings toward the therapist, the effective method 254 Research in Counselling and Psychotherapy involves forcefully attacking the patient's problematic, problem-supporting, problem-related thoughts, ideas and beliefs. A consequence may include further insight, understanding and a new and better way of seeing things (Mahrer, Nadler, Gervaize & Markow, 1 986; Mahrer, Gervaize, Nadler, Sterner & Talitman, 1988). How can you enable the person 's experiencing to be ful ler, stronger, more pleasant and accompanied with good feelings? The in-session condition or state is that the person is undergoing some kind of experiencing, which is mild or perhaps moderate, and the accompanying feelings are unpleasant, neutral or only mildly pleasant.

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