Counter-transference
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Counter-transference
Countertransference, in psychotherapy, refers to a therapist's redirection of feelings towards a patient or becoming emotionally entangled with them. This concept is central to the understanding of therapeutic dynamics in psychotherapy. Early 20th century Countertransference (), originally described by Sigmund Freud in 1910, refers to a therapist's unconscious feelings influenced by their patient. Freud recognized this as an ongoing challenge for therapists, stating the need for therapists to be aware and in control of these feelings. While Freud mainly saw countertransference as a personal issue for the therapist, his private correspondence indicates a deeper interest and understanding of its complexities. This concept broadened to include unconscious reactions, by the unconscious mind, shaped by the therapist's own history, which could impede objectivity and limit therapeutic effectiveness. For example, a therapist might unconsciously want a patient to succeed due to perso ...
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Psychodynamic Psychotherapy
Psychodynamic psychotherapy (or psychodynamic therapy) and psychoanalytic psychotherapy (or psychoanalytic therapy) are two categories of psychological therapies. Their main purpose is revealing the unconscious content of a client's psyche in an effort to alleviate psychic tension, which is inner conflict within the mind that was created in a situation of extreme stress or emotional hardship, often in the state of distress. The terms "psychoanalytic psychotherapy" and "psychodynamic psychotherapy" are often used interchangeably, but a distinction can be made in practice: though psychodynamic psychotherapy largely relies on psychoanalytical theory, it employs substantially shorter treatment periods than traditional psychoanalytical therapies. Studies on the specific practice of ''psychodynamic psychotherapy'' suggest that it is evidence-based. In contrast, the methods used by ''psychoanalysis'' lack high-quality studies and therefore makes it difficult to assert their effective ...
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Transference
Transference () is a phenomenon within psychotherapy in which repetitions of old feelings, attitudes, desires, or fantasies that someone displaces are subconsciously projected onto a here-and-now person. Traditionally, it had solely concerned feelings from a primary relationship during childhood. History Transference was first described by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, who considered it an important part of psychoanalytic treatment. Transference of this kind can be considered inappropriate without proper clinical supervision. Occurrence It is common for people to transfer feelings about their parents to their partners or children (that is, cross-generational entanglements). Other examples of transference would be a person mistrusting somebody who resembles an ex-spouse in manners, voice, or external appearance, or being overly compliant to someone who resembles a childhood friend. In ''The Psychology of the Transference'', Carl Jung states that ...
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Paula Heimann
Paula Heimann (née Klatzko; 2 February 1899 – 22 October 1982) was a German psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who established the phenomenon of countertransference as an important tool of psychoanalytic treatment. Life in Germany Born into a Jewish family which migrated from Russia, after studying medicine in Königsberg, Berlin, and Frankfurt, Paula Klatzko took and passed her '' Staatsexamen'' (state exams) in Breslau. There she met her future husband, the physician Franz Heimann. Together they went to Heidelberg where she trained to be a psychiatrist from 1924–1927. She wrote her doctoral dissertation in 1925. Their daughter Mirza was born that same year. In 1927, the Heimann family moved to Berlin, where she began her psychoanalytic training under Theodor Reik in 1929. Together with her husband she was a member of the International Society of Doctors Against War. Emigration and work in the United Kingdom In 1933, Heimann's husband had to leave Germany becaus ...
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Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy (also psychological therapy, talk therapy, or talking therapy) is the use of Psychology, psychological methods, particularly when based on regular Conversation, personal interaction, to help a person change behavior, increase happiness, and overcome problems. Psychotherapy aims to improve an individual's well-being and mental health, to resolve or mitigate troublesome behaviors, beliefs, compulsions, thoughts, or emotions, and to improve relationships and social skills. Numerous types of psychotherapy have been designed either for individual adults, families, or children and adolescents. Some types of psychotherapy are considered evidence-based for treating diagnosed mental disorders; other types have been criticized as pseudoscience. There are hundreds of psychotherapy techniques, some being minor variations; others are based on very different conceptions of psychology. Most approaches involve one-to-one sessions, between the client and therapist, but some are c ...
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Acting In
"Acting in" is a psychological term which has been given various meanings over the years, but which is most generally used in opposition to acting out to cover conflicts which are brought to life inside therapy, as opposed to outside. One commentator, noting the variety of usages, points out that it is often "unclear whether 'in' refers to the internalization ''into'' the personality, to the growth in ''in''sight, or to the acting with''in'' the session". Patients With respect to patients, the term 'acting in' has been used to refer to the process of a client/patient bringing an issue from outside the therapy into the analytic situation, and acting upon it there. The therapist is advised to respond to the issue immediately to prevent further and more disruptive acting in. Hanna Segal distinguished positive acting in from destructive acting in - both being aimed however at affecting the analyst's state of mind, whether to communicate or to confuse. Posture The term was used in ...
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Harold Searles
Harold Frederic Searles (September 1, 1918 – November 18, 2015) was one of the pioneers of psychiatric medicine specializing in psychoanalytic treatments of schizophrenia. Searles had the reputation of being a therapeutic virtuoso with difficult and borderline patients; and of being, in the words of Horacio Etchegoyen, president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, "not only a great analyst but also a sagacious observer and a creative and careful theoretician". Life Searles was born in 1918 at Hancock, New York, a small village in the Catskill Mountains along the Delaware River, which was the subject of many of his reminiscences in his first book, ''The Nonhuman Environment''. He attended Cornell University and Harvard Medical School before joining the US armed services in World War II, where he served as a captain After the war he continued his psychiatric training at the Chestnut Lodge, a private sanitarium in Rockville, Maryland, from 1949 to 1951, then at t ...
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Margaret Little
Margaret I. Little (21 May 1901 – 27 November 1994) was a British psychoanalyst of the British Middle Group, and an influential figure in the creation of object relations theory, particularly as an early proponent of the utility of countertransference in the analytic process. Training and contributions Little's second analysis was with Ella Freeman Sharpe, and her third with D. W. Winnicott; and it was out of her experiences as analysand that she wrote her seminal article of 1951 on 'Counter-transference and the patient's response to it'. There she insisted on the element of reality in the patient's perception of the analyst, and the way it could serve as a mirror for the analyst in illuminating the countertransference. She continued her exploration of the total quality of the analyst's response to the patient in later writings. She also took issue with what she saw as the coercive side of free association, maintaining that "We no longer 'require' our patients to tell u ...
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Therapeutic Relationship
A therapy or medical treatment is the attempted remediation of a health problem, usually following a medical diagnosis. Both words, ''treatment'' and ''therapy'', are often abbreviated tx, Tx, or Tx. As a rule, each therapy has indications and contraindications. There are many different types of therapy. Not all therapies are effective. Many therapies can produce unwanted adverse effects. ''Treatment'' and ''therapy'' are often synonymous, especially in the usage of health professionals. However, in the context of mental health, the term ''therapy'' may refer specifically to psychotherapy. Semantic field The words ''care'', ''therapy'', ''treatment'', and ''intervention'' overlap in a semantic field, and thus they can be synonymous depending on context. Moving rightward through that order, the connotative level of holism decreases and the level of specificity (to concrete instances) increases. Thus, in health-care contexts (where its senses are always noncou ...
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Role Suction
Role suction is a term introduced in the United States by Fritz Redl in the mid-20th century to describe the power of a social group to allocate roles to its members. W. R. Bion's group dynamics further explored the ways whereby the group (unconsciously) allocates particular functions to particular individuals in order to have its covert emotional needs met; and the process has recently been highlighted anew within the systems-centered therapy of Yvonne Agazarian. Among regularly occurring group roles are those of the scapegoat for the group's troubles; the joker; the peacemaker; the critic/spokesperson for group standards; the idol, or upholder of the group ideal; and the identified patient. In mixed gender groups, women may be disproportionately pressured by role suction into playing a nurturing/peacemaker role. Driving forces The ease whereby people pick out those who play complementary games, and the psychological splitting of good and bad help fuel such role differe ...
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Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy (also psychological therapy, talk therapy, or talking therapy) is the use of Psychology, psychological methods, particularly when based on regular Conversation, personal interaction, to help a person change behavior, increase happiness, and overcome problems. Psychotherapy aims to improve an individual's well-being and mental health, to resolve or mitigate troublesome behaviors, beliefs, compulsions, thoughts, or emotions, and to improve relationships and social skills. Numerous types of psychotherapy have been designed either for individual adults, families, or children and adolescents. Some types of psychotherapy are considered evidence-based for treating diagnosed mental disorders; other types have been criticized as pseudoscience. There are hundreds of psychotherapy techniques, some being minor variations; others are based on very different conceptions of psychology. Most approaches involve one-to-one sessions, between the client and therapist, but some are c ...
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Psychoanalysis
PsychoanalysisFrom Greek language, Greek: and is a set of theories and techniques of research to discover unconscious mind, unconscious processes and their influence on conscious mind, conscious thought, emotion and behaviour. Based on The Interpretation of Dreams, dream interpretation, psychoanalysis is also a talk therapy method for treating of mental disorders."All psychoanalytic theories include the idea that unconscious thoughts and feelings are central in mental functioning." Milton, Jane, Caroline Polmear, and Julia Fabricius. 2011. ''A Short Introduction to Psychoanalysis''. Sage Group, SAGE. p. 27."What is psychoanalysis? Of course, one is supposed to answer that it is many things — a theory, a research method, a therapy, a body of knowledge. In what might be considered an unfortunately abbreviated description, Freud said that anyone who recognizes transference and resistance is a psychoanalyst, even if he comes to conclusions other than his own. … I prefer to think ...
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Projective Identification
Projective identification is a term introduced by Melanie Klein and then widely adopted in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Projective identification may be used as a type of defense, a means of communicating, a primitive form of relationship, or a route to psychological change; used for ridding the self of unwanted parts or for controlling the other's body and mind. According to the American Psychological Association, the expression can have two meanings: # In psychoanalysis, projective identification is a defense mechanism in which the individual projects qualities that are unacceptable to the self onto another person, and that person introjects the projected qualities and believes him/herself to be characterized by them appropriately and justifiably. # In the object relations theory of Melanie Klein, projective identification is a defense mechanism in which a person fantasizes that part of their ego is split off and projected into the object in order to harm or to protect the ...
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