Guided Learning – Week 5 – Psychodynamic Approach

Reading:
Core textbook – Introduction to Counselling – McLeod (4th Ed)

Chapter 4 – Themes and issues in the psychodynamic approach to counselling

(pp81-127)

Research:
Freud’s thoughts on the interpretation of dreams can be found on the Freud
Museum website under ‘Dream Analysis’ or by clicking on the link below:

http://www.freud.org.uk/education/topic/10576/subtopic/40032/

You may also like to take an online Rorschach Ink Blot test at:
http://theinkblot.com/

Personal Development
Whether you agree with all of Freud’s psychodynamic concepts or not, most
people would admit that there have been times when they weren’t fully
conscious of what they were doing or why they were doing it. However, the
notion of the unconscious goes far beyond the occasional automatic action.
The psychodynamic counselling and psychotherapy perspective suggests that
the unconscious mind functions in a highly specific manner, concealing difficult
or uncomfortable emotions from the past. In later life Freud wrote:

“Psychoanalysis has impressed us very strongly with the new idea that large an
important regions of the mind are normally removed from the knowledge of
the ego, so that the processes that occur in them must be recognised as
unconscious in the true dynamic sense of the term…..The id is the obscure
inaccessible part of our personality….a chaos, a cauldron of seething
excitement. We suppose that it is somewhere in direct contact with somatic
processes, and takes over from them instinctual needs and gives them mental
expression, but we cannot say in what substratum this contact is made. These
instinct fill it with energy, but it has no organisation and no unified will, only an
impulsion to obtain satisfaction for the instinctual needs in accordance with
the pleasure principle” (Freud, 1933: 93-100)

Do you agree with this view on the unconscious? Does it fully capture how you
would describe it? If it doesn’t, how would you define it?

Would it be possible to carry out psychodynamic counselling without referring

to the unconscious processes?