There are many different types of therapies or psychological methods used toalleviate problems. First, there are therapies that emphasize the value ofgaining insight to personal problems. Then there are behavior therapies andcognitive therapies, which are used to directly change troublesome actions andthoughts.
Two therapies I will be describing are rational-emotive behaviortherapy and psychoanalysis. According to author Dennis Coon of Introduction toPsychology, ?Rational-emotive behavior therapy (REBT) attempts to changeor remove irrational beliefs that cause emotional problems. Albert Ellis statesthe basic idea of rational-emotive behavior is easy as ABC. He assumes thatpeople become unhappy and develop self-defeating habits because they haveunrealistic or faulty beliefs. Ellis analyzes problems in this way: The letter Astands for an activating experience, which the person assumes to be the cause ofC, an emotional consequence. For example, a person who is rejected (theactivating experience) feels depressed, threatened, or hurt (the consequence).
Rational-emotive therapy, however, shows that the real problem comes between Aand C. In between is B, the patient’s unrealistic beliefs. There are manyirrational or unrealistic beliefs that we all tend to hold. For instance,certain people I must deal with are thoroughly bad and should be severely blamedand punished for. This could lead to ?The old man next door is such apain.
I’m going to play my stereo even louder the next time he complains. Another irrational belief is it is awful and upsetting when things are not theway I would very much like them to be. For example, ?I should have gottena B in that class. The teacher doesn’t like me. Rational-emotive behaviortherapy holds that events do not cause us to have feelings.
We feel as we dobecause of our beliefs. Psychoanalysis resolves internal conflicts that lead toemotional suffering. Because of the huge amounts of time and money it requires,psychoanalysts have become rare. Four basic techniques Freud relied on touncover the roots of psychoanalysis are free association, dream analysis,analysis of resistance, and analysis of transference. During psychoanalysis, thepatient engages in free association, by saying whatever comes to mind. They mustspeak without concern for whether the ideas are painful, embarrassing, orillogical.
Dream analysis is also considered a good way to tap theunconsciousness. Freud felt that forbidden desires and unconscious feelings aremore freely expressed in dreams. Then there is analysis of resistance where theanalyst becomes aware of resistances, or blockages in the flow of ideas, and heor she brings them to the patients awareness so they can be dealt withrealistically. Finally, there is analysis of transference, which the patient mayact as if the analyst is the rejecting father, former lover, or whoever thepatient is feeling anger towards. All of these techniques are used inpsychoanalysis today.
Both rational-emotive behavior and psychoanalysis help thepatients recognize their problem and deal with it. The world today should belucky and take advantage of the many different types of therapies we are able tochoose from. These are just two of the many we are able to have.
