Compare And Contrast Psychoanalysis And Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a mixture of both Cognitive Therapy (CT), which deals with a person’s thoughts and Behavioral Therapy (BT), which concentrates on an individual’s overt or outside personality. According to Barbara P. Early and Melissa D. Grady, CT specializes in the mental process that can affect an individual’s feelings and behavior, while BT is focusing on the external environment that can cause the behaviors, such as a stimulus (Early & Grady, 2016). The use of the two therapies together allows the

Psychoanalysis is a theory which is used to understand repressed or unconscious impulses, and conflicts the individual has internally or externally in their lives.

CBT therapists use the first session or two to complete a problem analysis, perform a detailed assessment and create a case formulation with the client. The therapist seeks to identify: 1) the behaviors, emotions, and thoughts which make the situation a problem, 2) predisposing factors, often going back to childhood and adolescents, 3) precipitants, 4) protective factors, 5) triggers, 6) symptoms, and 7) maintenance cycles (O’Connell, 2012). This starts the session out with a very problem-focused discussion encouraging growth of the problem, with goal setting often not starting until the second

What is psychoanalysis? Psychoanalysis is a form of treatment invented by Sigmund Freud that usually focuses on the early years of the patient’s life and his/her relationship with immediate family members. A wise man once said, “There are four questions that every good student of psychology will ask about a personality theory. The first question

Therapies like the psychoanalysis can take years to obtain results. Its highly instructive nature and making use of homework assignment s given, contribute to the CBT doing well. The CBT is time related and has time restrictions; this helps the clients to understand the very beginning of the therapy process. Ending the therapy process is made on a mutual consent between the doctor and the patient. There is a need for a sound therapeutic relationship with the patient for effective therapy.

The psychosocial approach helps us to develop a healthy questioning of the obvious. An open mind, imagination and knowledge of personality functioning, human behaviour and emotional suffering are inherent in the ideas; they assist in reaching;differential diagnoses and treatment plans. This is another way of saying that clients interact with their environments in unique ways and if we are to give service which is accurately targeted then, when appropriate, we have to comprehend underlying feelings and motives which can block people from making optimum use of such help. Freudian psychoanalytic ideas, particularly personality theory, began to feed into what became known as psychodynamic casework.

Psychology explores human behavior and the human mental process figuring ways to improve the thinking and attitude of an individual’s existence. Sometimes, different techniques are used and tried to properly resolve the problem within the multitude of possible behavioral issues. Moreover, Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist, developed many theories, psychodynamic therapy, for clinically treating people with mental health problems through their unconscious mind; Then, Sigmund Freud’s theories or therapy, rather, diverged into other types of therapies such as Biological Psychology or Cognitive Psychology. No doubt, there are various perspectives, both strong and weak, in the field of Psychology using different techniques on different

CBT is a time- sensitive, structured, present oriented psychotherapy (Beck Institute, 2016). CBT is directed at helping clients change their unhelpful thinking and behavior through various techniques. The participant has failed to recognize that his irrational thoughts, (feeling singled out because of his race and health issues) are preventing him from fully functioning causing him to become depressed. He is also struggling to shift his focus from his negative interactions with the staff and residents in treatment and this leads to feelings of anger.

In her book Therapeutic Approaches in Psychology, Susan Cave explains that “psychoanalysis aims to effect a cure by uncovering [the] unconscious conflicts in the course of analysis and by helping the patient to deal with them rationally.” This approach should result in a “fundamental personality change” thereby freeing the patient of “neurotic disorders”. Psychodynamic therapists operate under the notion that treating symptoms alone will not cure the underlying issue and “may well result in symptom substitution, where by a replacement disorder develops”. Cave goes on to report that, cognitive-behavioral therapy or CBT, in contrast, keeps “its focus on the present rather than the past, makes the general assumption that interaction with the world is carried out via a process of interpretations and inferences about things that happen to us” and, although “these cognitive processes can become distorted, they are accessible to consciousness and the individual has the power to change them.” Therefore, the therapeutic content a session will differ between these two domains of

An important difference between the two approaches is that CBT therapy may have a short duration, whereas in the psychodynamic approach the treatment period is expected to be long and may even last for years. Another difference between the two approaches is that CBT is a structured therapy with specific

* Psychoanalysis: technique of helping people with emotional problems based on Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind (based on

Cognitive therapy is similar to psychoanalysis in that it examines clients’ emotional reactions, cognitive therapy also explores clients’ narratives. Moreover, cognitive therapy assumes that clients are affected by automatic thoughts and beliefs to which they are unaware, but unlike psychoanalysis, cognitive therapy does not equate cognition's with the unconscious. Even though automatic thoughts and core beliefs may be nonconscious, repressed and dissociated experiences and other reified constructs are not part of cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy is short-term, lasting between twelve and sixteen sessions, and psychoanalysis is long-term, lasting for years. Cognitive therapists are active and directive and they structure counseling along

Some advantages of psychoanalytic theory are that it uncovers the roots of the problem, helps clients to relieve past experiences to work through the repressed conflicts and it explains how the personality is constructed. On the flip side, psychoanalytic therapy often needs to occur for extended periods of time and it is expensive to hire a therapist in the long run. Therefore people might want to opt for lesser sessions and therapists may focus on limited objectives instead of personality reconstruction. In psychoanalytic therapy, the therapist often takes and anonymous role, which could make the patient feel uncomfortable and not open up. In a research done by the Young Adult Psychotherapy Project (YAPP), it showed that therapists should strive to form a ‘secure attachment relationship’ with the client so that they can open up to painful memories and thoughts in the process (Lilliengren, 2014). Therefore therapists should strive for a warmer approach. Moreover, there is also a debate on the reliability and safety of the process of memory

In this paper, two approaches to therapy will be described, evaluated and finally compared and contrasted with each other. The two approaches the author chose are psychoanalysis and person centered therapy. Psychoanalysis was developed by Sigmund Freud at the end of the nineteenth century and was one the very first integrated approaches to psychotherapy (Hergenhahn, 2000). Psychoanalysis works predominantly with the unconscious level of the mind and assumes that most mental disturbances stem from problems connected to the unconscious (Hough, 2012). On the other hand, the theory behind person centered therapy, developed by Carl Rogers mid-twentieth century, states that any person is able to find the resolution to his or her problems