Archives for July 2012

ABSTRACT

 

This work contains theorethical references about psychotherapy used for clients/pacients who come for therapy beeing influenced by religious, more or less, disfunctional ideas. We also may highlight the fact that usually, persons who encounter several problems which might be solved by using cognitive-behavioral  therapy, have a disfunctional belief that religion is the only way for solving theese problems. Usually these people are ready to try a therapeutical plan, but they also are ready to give up on therapy, so much because of their disfunctional beliefs so long because of some personality disorders which are more or less obvious. It takes a high level of knowledge and experience for the therapist, so that the therapy should work properly and also to offer good results. In order to colaborate with the client/pacient in good terms, we have apealed to the opinion of some psychotherapy classics.

 

Collective unconscious archetypes

In addition to the personal unconscious, there is still a level of spirit and deeper unconscious, the collective unconscious, which is universal and impersonal and that, therefore, it is the same to all of us. The collective unconscious, must emphasize again, it is not so dependent on the individual’s personal history: there is something gained by us lifetime, but rather something suprapersonal “before us”, while it bears “primary  images” of our ancestral life. It is therefore a great mistake to suppose that the psyche of the new born is a tabula rasa, in that it does not contain anything. Every child, or adult, and each is determined by influences what emanates from the collective unconscious; and these influences, which operates independently of the personal unconscious, guarantees each individual the similarity and even an identity experience and representation. By making this statement, Jung is not trying to prove  the existence of collective unconscious; He admits its existence rather than as part of its working hypothesis to explain the almost universal parallelism of imaging in children neurotic fantasies,  dreams, visions, and patient schizoid visions, ethnological, in primitive cultures of mythologies.

[Read more…] about RELIGION AS A RESOURCE, OR AN OBSTACLE IN PSYCHOTHERAPY

 

By
Robert DePaolo

Abstract

This article discusses
clinical practice in terms of the medical model, particularly with regard to
the Freudian notion of a psychic homeostat, and more broadly, the tendency in
physiological and psychological systems to re-integrate in response to systemic
disruptions. The point is made that the personality automatically moves toward
re-stabilization and state restoration when under duress and that clinical
intervention can either enhance or interfere with that process; thus raising
the question of whether counseling is appropriate, whether the ostensible
pathology can be culturally,  as opposed
to existentially defined, and how clinicians might proceed to establish a new
stasis that coincides most closely with the client’s natural restorative
responses and cognitions.

With respect to the process of psychotherapy there is nothing unusual or derelict about “leaving
the client to his own devices” – even in the aftermath of duress (Aubrey, Bond et. al. 1997). Since  Sigmund and Anna
Freud (1967) first developed a framework for the use of defense mechanisms (which Sigmund likened to the immune reactions to disease in the soma)
clinicians have come to agree that defense mechanisms work to restore stability. In that sense they operate much the same way as any system in nature
– seeking, as it were, to revert to a prior state. All such systems, which could encompass everything from physiology to cognition to atoms to the
structure of human language require some degree of redundancy. Indeed one could draw a parallel between quantum mechanics and clinical psychology by suggesting
that, like the photon, the personality has a memory of its inherent structure and is disinclined to deviate from that.

[Read more…] about A Discussion of the Medical Model in Clinical Practice