Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Psychodynamic therapy
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What is Psychodynamic Therapy

• Psychodynamic therapy is a “global therapy”, or form of therapy with a focus on a
holistic perspective of the client. It is also known as insight-oriented therapy.

• Psychodynamic therapists attempt to help clients find patterns in their emotions,

thoughts, and beliefs in order to gain insight into their current self.

• Psychodynamic therapy sessions are intense and open-ended, dictated by the client’s
free association rather than a set schedule or agenda.

• Includes those means by which a therapist attempts to provide new interpersonal

experience for another human being
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Goals of Psychodynamic Therapy

• Enhance the client’s self-awareness:
– The client must have the self-awareness to discover these unconscious
patterns of thought and an understanding of how these patterns came to be in
order to deal with them.
• Foster understanding of the client’s thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in relation to
their past experiences, especially his or her experiences as a child.
• All psychodynamic therapies aim to strengthen patients' ability to understand the
motivations for and meanings of their own and others' subjective experiences,
behavior, and relationships.
• The therapist will encourage the client to talk freely about whatever is on their
(conscious) mind. The thoughts and feelings discussed will be probed for
recurring patterns in the client’s unconscious mind.
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Assumptions
• Some postulates or assumptions that have driven psychoanalytic therapy.
1. Access to unconscious functioning comes through the associative process.
2. Later mental structures have to be explained by earlier experiences, by
turning back to the past.
3. Determinism, the conviction that nothing that happens is accidental, is an
accepted principle.
4. Instinct, that is, as the source of motivation in bodily processes, is an accepted
concept.
5. The assumption of the concept of the unconscious is necessary because
conscious experiences leave gaps in mental life that unconscious processes
bridge.
6. Chronic problems are rooted in the unconscious mind and must be brought to
light for catharsis to occur.
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Free association
• A simple technique of psychodynamic therapy is free association in which a
patient talks of whatever comes into their mind. 
• This technique involves a therapist reading a list of words (e.g. mother, childhood
etc.) and the patient immediately responds with the first word that comes to
mind.  It is hoped that fragments of repressed memories will emerge in the course
of free association.
• Free association may provoke an especially intense or vivid memory of a
traumatic event, this can lead to a healing experience of catharsis if the client
feels like it helped them work through a significant problem.
• Free association may not prove useful if the client shows resistance, and is
reluctant to say what he or she is thinking
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Resistance
• Psychodynamic therapist are convinced that patients will resist change, sometimes
in subtle ways, even while appearing to be motivated and compliant.

• “Resistance" as initially used by Sigmund Freud, referred to patients blocking

memories from conscious memory.

• Ideas unacceptable to conscious; prevents therapy from proceeding.

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Transference
• Transference is a phenomenon in psychoanalysis characterized by unconscious
redirection of feelings for one person to another.
• It is the unconscious redirection of feelings for one person to another (including
the therapist)
• Displacement of feelings, thoughts, patterns of behavior, originally experienced
in relation to significant figures during childhood, onto a current relationship.
• More intensified in psychoanalysis; reveals early patterns.
• For example, a client may interpret any slight criticism by the therapist as a
devastating blow, transferring feelings of self-loathing that the client had
repressed from childhood experiences of parental rejection.
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Counter-Transference
• In psychotherapy, counter-transference is a word that was used by Freud to mean
emotional reactions to a patient that are determined not by the patient's own
personality traits and disorders, but rather the psychoanalyst's own
unconscious conflict.
• It occurs when a therapist transfers emotions to a person in therapy, is often a
reaction to transference, a phenomenon in which the person in treatment redirects
feelings for others onto the therapist.
• For example, a therapist may meet with a person who has extreme difficulty
making conversation. The therapist may begin, unwittingly, to lead the
conversation and provide additional prompts to the person in treatment to
encourage discussion.
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Role of the therapist

• The therapist plays this role by encouraging the client to talk about the emotions
they are feeling and helping the client to identify recurring patterns in their
thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
• The most important roles of the therapist is to probe the client’s past.
• The therapist may also observe how the client interacts within the therapeutic
relationship and add their own insight on the client’s relationship.
• The therapist’s role is to aid the client in connecting the dots between their past
experiences and their current problems, and leveraging their internal resources to
address these problems.
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Interpretation
• The therapist is likely to stay relatively quiet throughout therapy, but will
occasionally interject with thoughts or interpretations of the topics the client
chooses to discuss.
• Therapist provides analysis of the meaning of the thoughts, behaviors, and
dreams and free association of the patient. Interpretation leads to understanding
and resolution of unconscious issues.
• Identify, clarify and translate clients material
• To help client make sense of their lives and to expand their consciousness
• Analyst must pay attention not only to the content but also the process of
conveying it to the patient
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Dream Analysis
• Royal road to the unconscious, as during sleep, the ego’s defences are lowered
and unacceptable impulses find expression in dreams.
• The avenue to study the unconscious material and giving the client insight into
some areas of unresolved problems.
• Some memories are unacceptable by the ego that they are expressed in symbolic
form(dream)
• Dreams have two level of content which is Latent Content (hidden but true
meaning) and Manifest Content (obvious meaning).
• Dream analysis takes place as the therapist uncovers the disguised, latent content
within the actual, manifest content of the dream.
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Freudian Slip
• It is the least formal (and perhaps least applied) technique in psychodynamic
therapy.
• A “Freudian slip” is also known as a slip of the tongue or, more formally,
parapraxes. These slips refer to instances when we mean to say one thing but
accidentally let “slip” another, specifically when deeper meaning can be
attributed to this slip.
• Another example could be when you are feeling frazzled or overwhelmed at
work and your boss pops for a quick discussion. You aren’t really paying
attention, and you absentmindedly say “Thanks Mom” instead of using your
boss’ name.
• A psychodynamic therapist may pay special attention to any such slips, whether
they occur in session or are simply related by the client during a session, and find
meaning in the word substitution.