Capella Similarities and Differences Between Freud and Adler Ideas Comparison For this discussion you will compare the ideas of Freud, Adler, Erikson, and

Capella Similarities and Differences Between Freud and Adler Ideas Comparison For this discussion you will compare the ideas of Freud, Adler, Erikson, and Jung. Draw on your readings from your Corey text, Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy, and other research articles from the Capella library. In your post, respond to the following:
Describe the basic similarities and differences between the ideas of Freud and Adler. In what ways are Freud and Adler relevant today?
Explain some of the changes Erikson, Jung, and Adler made to the Freud’s original psychoanalytic theory.
Read about the therapeutic techniques and procedures on pages 72–77 of your Corey text and describe at least one. Indicate the factors of the technique or procedure that make it psychoanalytic. Consider the psychoanalytic view of human nature, structure of personality, consciousness and the unconscious, et cetera. Corey Text pg. 72-77
Corey, G. (2017). Theory and practice of counseling and psychotherapy (10th ed.).
Boston, MA: Cengage. ISBN: 9781305263727.
Application: Therapeutic Techniques and Procedures
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This section deals with the techniques most commonly used by psychoanalytically oriented
therapists. It also includes a section on the applications of the psychoanalytic approach to group
counseling. Psychoanalytic or psychodynamic therapy differs from traditional psychoanalysis in
these ways:
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? The therapy has more to limited objectives than restructuring one’s personality.
? The therapist is less likely to use the couch.
? There are fewer sessions each week.
? There is more frequent use of supportive interventions such as reassurance, expressions of
empathy and support, and suggestions.
? There is more emphasis on the here-and-now relationship between therapist and client.
? There is more latitude for therapist self-disclosure without “polluting the transference.”
? Less emphasis is given to the therapist’s neutrality.
? There is a focus on mutual transference and countertransference enactments.
? The focus is more on pressing practical concerns than on working with fantasy material.
The techniques of psychoanalytic therapy are aimed at increasing awareness, fostering insights
into the client’s behavior, and understanding the meanings of symptoms. The therapy proceeds
from the client’s talk to catharsis (or expression of emotion), to insight, to working through
unconscious material. This work is done to attain the goals of intellectual and emotional
understanding and reeducation, which, it is hoped, will lead to personality change. The six basic
techniques of psychoanalytic therapy are (1) maintaining the analytic framework, (2) free
association, (3) interpretation, (4) dream analysis, (5) analysis of resistance, and (6) analysis of
transference. See Case Approach to Counseling and Psychotherapy (Corey, 2013, chap. 2) for
an illustration by Dr. William Blau, a psychoanalytically oriented therapist, of some treatment
techniques in the case of Ruth.
Maintaining the Analytic Framework
The psychoanalytic process stresses maintaining a particular framework aimed at accomplishing
the goals of this type of therapy. Maintaining the analytic framework refers to a whole range
of procedural and stylistic factors, such as the analyst’s relative anonymity, maintaining
neutrality and objectivity, the regularity and consistency of meetings, starting and ending the
sessions on time, clarity on fees, and basic boundary issues such as the avoidance of advice
giving or imposition of the therapist’s values (Curtis & Hirsch, 2011). One of the most powerful
features of psychoanalytically oriented therapy is that the consistent framework is itself a
therapeutic factor, comparable on an emotional level to the regular feeding of an infant. Analysts
attempt to minimize departures from this consistent pattern (such as vacations, changes in fees,
or changes in the meeting environment). Where departures are unavoidable, these will often be
the focus of interpretations.
Free Association
Free association is a central technique in psychoanalytic therapy, and it plays a key role in the
process of maintaining the analytic framework. In free association, clients are encouraged to say
whatever comes to mind, regardless of how painful, silly, trivial, illogical, or irrelevant it may
seem. In essence, clients try to flow with any feelings or thoughts by reporting them immediately
without censorship. As the analytic work progresses, most clients will occasionally depart from
this basic rule, and these resistances will be interpreted by the therapist when it is timely to do so.
Free association is one of the basic tools used to open the doors to unconscious wishes,
fantasies, conflicts, and motivations. This technique often leads to some recollection of past
experiences and, at times, a catharsis or release of intense feelings that have been blocked. This
release is not seen as crucial in itself, however. During the free-association process, the
therapist’s task is to identify the repressed material that is locked in the unconscious. The
sequence of associations guides the therapist in understanding the connections clients make
among events. Blockings or disruptions in associations serve as cues to anxiety-arousing
material. The therapist interprets the material to clients, guiding them toward increased insight
into the underlying dynamics.
As analytic therapists listen to their clients’ free associations, they hear not only the surface
content but also the hidden meaning. Nothing the client says is taken at face value. For example,
a slip of the tongue can suggest that an expressed emotion is accompanied by a conflicting affect.
Areas that clients do not talk about are as significant as the areas they do discuss.
Interpretation
Interpretation consists of the analyst’s pointing out, explaining, and even teaching the client the
meanings of behavior that is manifested in dreams, free association, resistances, defenses, and
the therapeutic relationship itself. The functions of interpretations are to enable the ego to
assimilate new material and to speed up the process of uncovering further unconscious material.
Interpretation is grounded in the therapist’s assessment of the client’s personality and of the
factors in the client’s past that contributed to his or her difficulties. Under contemporary
definitions, interpretation includes identifying, clarifying, and translating the client’s material.
Relational psychoanalytic therapists present possible meanings associated with a client’s
thoughts, feelings, or events as a hypothesis rather than a truth about a client’s inner world
(Curtis & Hirsch, 2011). Interpretations are provided in a collaborative manner to help clients
make sense of their lives and to expand their consciousness.
The therapist uses the client’s reactions as a gauge in determining a client’s readiness to make
an interpretation. It is important that interpretations be appropriately timed because the client will
reject therapist interpretations that are poorly timed. A general rule is that interpretation should
be presented when the phenomenon to be interpreted is close to conscious awareness. In other
words, the therapist should interpret material that the client has not yet seen but is capable of
tolerating and incorporating. Another general rule is that interpretation should start from the
surface and go only as deep as the client is able to go.
Dream Analysis
Dream analysis is an important procedure for uncovering unconscious material and giving the
client insight into some areas of unresolved problems. During sleep, defenses are lowered and
repressed feelings surface. Freud sees dreams as the “royal road to the unconscious,” for in them
one’s unconscious wishes, needs, and fears are expressed. Some motivations are so unacceptable
to the person that they are expressed in disguised or symbolic form rather than being revealed
directly.
Dreams have two levels of content: latent content and manifest content. Latent content
consists of hidden, symbolic, and unconscious motives, wishes, and fears. Because they are so
painful and threatening, the unconscious sexual and aggressive impulses that make up latent
content are transformed into the more acceptable manifest content, which is the dream as it
appears to the dreamer. The process by which the latent content of a dream is transformed into
the less threatening manifest content is called dream work. The therapist’s task is to uncover
disguised meanings by studying the symbols in the manifest content of the dream.
During the session, therapists may ask clients to free associate to some aspect of the manifest
content of a dream for the purpose of uncovering the latent meanings. Therapists participate in
the process by exploring clients’ associations with them. Interpreting the meanings of the dream
elements helps clients unlock the repression that has kept the material from consciousness and
relate the new insight to their present struggles. Dreams may serve as a pathway to repressed
material, but dreams also provide an understanding of clients’ current functioning. Relational
psychoanalytic therapists are particularly interested in the connection of dreams to clients’ lives.
The dream is viewed as a significant message to clients to examine something that could be
problematic if left unexamined (Curtis & Hirsch, 2011).
Analysis and Interpretation of Resistance
Resistance, a concept fundamental to the practice of psychoanalysis, is anything that works
against the progress of therapy and prevents the client from producing previously unconscious
material. Specifically, resistance is the client’s reluctance to bring to the surface of awareness
unconscious material that has been repressed. Resistance refers to any idea, attitude, feeling, or
action (conscious or unconscious) that fosters the status quo and gets in the way of change.
During free association or association to dreams, the client may evidence an unwillingness to
relate certain thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Freud viewed resistance as an unconscious
dynamic that people use to defend against the intolerable anxiety and pain that would arise if
they were to become aware of their repressed impulses and feelings.
As a defense against anxiety, resistance operates specifically in psychoanalytic therapy to
prevent clients and therapists from succeeding in their joint effort to gain insights into the
dynamics of the unconscious. An assumption of analytic treatment is that clients wish both to
change and to remain embedded in their old world. Clients tend to cling to their familiar patterns,
regardless of how painful they may be. Therapists need to create a safe climate so clients can
recognize resistance and explore it in therapy (Curtis & Hirsch, 2011; McWilliams, 2014;
Wolitzky, 2011a). Because resistance blocks threatening material from entering awareness,
analytic therapists point it out, but Safran and Kriss (2014) caution therapists to avoid framing
resistance in a way that implies that the client is not cooperating with the treatment. Therapists’
interpretations help clients become aware of the reasons for the resistance so they can deal with
them. As a general rule, therapists point out and interpret the most obvious resistances to lessen
the possibility of clients’ rejecting the interpretation and to increase the chance that they will
begin to look at their resistive behavior.
Resistances are not just something to be overcome. Because they are representative of usual
defensive approaches in daily life, they need to be recognized as devices that defend against
anxiety but that interfere with the ability to accept change that could lead to experiencing a more
gratifying life. It is crucial that therapists respect the resistances of clients and assist them in
working therapeutically with their defenses. When handled properly, exploring resistance can be
an extremely valuable tool in understanding the client.
Analysis and Interpretation of Transference
As was mentioned earlier, transference manifests itself in the therapeutic process when earlier
relationships contribute to clients distorting the present with the therapist. The transference
situation is considered valuable because its manifestations provide clients with the opportunity to
reexperience a variety of feelings that would otherwise be inaccessible. Through the relationship
with the therapist, clients express feelings, beliefs, and desires that they have buried in their
unconscious. Interpreting transference is a route to elucidating the client’s intrapsychic life
(Wolitzky, 2011b). Through this interpretation, clients can recognize how they are repeating the
same dynamic patterns in their relationships with the therapist, with significant figures from the
past, and in present relationships with significant others. Through appropriate interpretations and
working through of these current expressions of early feelings, clients are able to become aware
of and to gradually change some of their long-standing patterns of behavior. Analytically
oriented therapists consider the process of exploring and interpreting transference feelings as the
core of the therapeutic process because it is aimed at achieving increased awareness and
personality change.
The analysis of transference is a central technique in both classical psychoanalysis and
psychoanalytically oriented therapy, for it allows clients to achieve here-and-now insight into the
influence of the past on their present functioning. Interpretation of the transference relationship
enables clients to work through old conflicts that are keeping them fixated and retarding their
emotional growth. In essence, the effects of early relationships are counteracted by working
through a similar emotional conflict in the current therapeutic relationship. An example of
utilizing transference is given in a later section on the case of Stan.
Application to Group Counseling
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The psychodynamic model offers a conceptual framework for understanding the history of the
members of a group and a way of thinking about how their past is affecting them now in the
group and in their everyday lives. Group leaders can think psychoanalytically, even if they do not
use many psychoanalytic techniques. Regardless of their theoretical orientation, it is well for
group therapists to understand such psychoanalytic phenomena as transference,
countertransference, resistance, and the use of ego-defense mechanisms as reactions to anxiety.
Transference and countertransference have significant implications for the practice of group
counseling and therapy. Group work may re-create early life situations that continue to affect the
client. In most groups, individuals elicit a range of feelings such as attraction, anger,
competition, and avoidance. These transference feelings may resemble those that members
experienced toward significant people in their past. Members will most likely find symbolic
mothers, fathers, siblings, and lovers in their group. Group participants frequently compete for
the attention of the leader—a situation reminiscent of earlier times when they had to vie for their
parents’ attention with their brothers and sisters. This rivalry can be explored in a group as a way
of gaining increased awareness of how the participants dealt with competition as children and
how their past success or lack of it affects their present interactions with others. A basic tenet of
psychodynamic therapy groups is the notion that group participants, through their interactions
within the group, re-create their social situation, implying that the group becomes a microcosm
of their everyday lives (Rutan et al., 2014). Groups can provide a dynamic understanding of
how people function in out-of-group situations. Projections onto the leader and onto other
members are valuable clues to unresolved conflicts within the person that can be identified,
explored, and worked through in the group.
The group therapist also has reactions to members and is affected by members’ reactions.
Countertransference can be a useful tool for the group therapist to understand the dynamics that
might be operating in a group. However, group leaders need to be alert to signs of unresolved
internal conflicts that could interfere with effective group functioning and create a situation in
which members are used to satisfy the leaders’ own unfulfilled needs. If, for example, a group
leader has an extreme need to be liked and approved of, the leader might behave in ways to get
members’ approval and confirmation, resulting in behaviors primarily designed to please the
group members and ensure their continued support.
Group therapists need to exercise vigilance lest they misuse their power by turning the group
into a forum for pushing clients to adjust by conforming to the dominant cultural values at the
expense of losing their own worldview and cultural identity. Group practitioners also need to be
aware of their own potential biases. The concept of countertransference can be expanded to
include unacknowledged bias and prejudices that may be conveyed unintentionally through the
techniques used by group therapists.
For a more extensive discussion of the psychoanalytic approach to group counseling, refer to
Theory and Practice of Group Counseling (Corey, 2016, chap. 6). Psychodynamic Group
Psychotherapy (Rutan et al., 2014) also provides an excellent discussion of this subject.
Jung’s Perspective on the Development of Personality
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At one time Freud referred to Carl Jung as his spiritual heir, but Jung eventually developed a
theory of personality that was markedly different from Freudian psychoanalysis. Jung’s
analytical psychology is an elaborate explanation of human nature that combines ideas from
history, mythology, anthropology, and religion (Schultz & Schultz, 2013). Jung made
monumental contributions to our deep understanding of the human personality and personal
development, particularly during middle age.
Jung’s pioneering work places central importance on the psychological changes that are
associated with midlife. He maintained that at midlife we need to let go of many of the values
and behaviors that guided the first half of our life and confront our unconscious. We can best do
this by paying attention to the messages of our dreams and by engaging in creative activities such
as writing or painting. The task facing us during the midlife period is to be less influenced by
rational thought and to instead give expression to these unconscious forces and integrate them
into our conscious life (Schultz & Schultz, 2013).
Jung learned a great deal from his own midlife crisis. At age 81 he wrote about his
recollections in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961), in which he also
identified some of his major contributions. Jung made a choice to focus on the unconscious
realm in his personal life, which influenced the development of his theory of personality.
However, he had a very different conception of the unconscious than did Freud. Jung was a
colleague of Freud’s and valued many of his contributions, but Jung eventually came to the point
of not being able to support some of Freud’s basic concepts, especially his theory of sexuality.
Jung (1961) recalled Freud’s words to him: “My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the
sexual theory. This is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an
unshakable bulwark” (p. 150). Jung became convinced that he could no longer collaborate with
Freud because he believed Freud placed his own authority over truth. Freud had little tolerance
for theoreticians such as Jung and Adler who dared to challenge his theories. Although Jung had
a lot to lose professionally by withdrawing from Freud, he saw no other choice. He subsequently
developed a spiritual approach that places great emphasis on being impelled to find meaning in
life in contrast to being driven by the psychological and biological forces described by Freud.
Jung maintained that we are not merely shaped by past events (Freudian determinism), but that
we are influenced by our future as well as our past. Part of the nature of humans is to be
constantly developing, growing, and moving toward a balanced and complete level of
development. For Jung, our present personality is shaped both by who and what we have been
and also by what we aspire to be in the future. His theory is based on the assumption that humans
tend to move toward the fulfillment or realization of all of their capabilities. Achieving
individuation— the harmonious integration of the conscious and unconscious aspects of
personality—is an innate and primary goal. For Jung, we have both constructive and destructive
forces, a…
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