Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

Clinical or Psychiatric Social Workers
Professionals with a master’s degree and specialized training who may provide therapy, 
usually regarding common family and personal problems.
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546 Chapter 
16 
Treatment of Psychological Disorders
Psychodynamic 
Approaches to 
Therapy
 Psychodynamic therapy 
seeks to bring unresolved past 
confl icts and unacceptable impulses from the unconscious 
into the conscious, where patients may deal with the prob-
lems more effectively. Psychodynamic approaches are 
based on Freud’s psychoanalytic approach to personality, 
which holds that individuals employ defense mechanism s, 
psychological strategies to protect themselves from unac-
ceptable unconscious impulses. 
The most common defense mechanism is repression, 
which pushes threatening confl icts and impulses back into the unconscious. However, 
since unacceptable confl icts and impulses can never be completely buried, some of the 
anxiety associated with them can produce abnormal behavior in the form of what 
Freud called neurotic symptoms . 
How do we rid ourselves of the anxiety produced by unconscious, unwanted 
impulses and drives? To Freud, the answer was to confront the confl icts and impulses 
by bringing them out of the unconscious part of the mind and into the conscious part. 
Freud assumed that this technique would reduce anxiety stemming from past confl icts 
and that the patient could then participate in his or her daily life more effectively. 
A psychodynamic therapist, then, faces the challenge of fi nding a way to assist 
patients’ attempts to explore and understand the unconscious. The technique that has 
evolved has a number of components, but basically it consists of guiding patients to 
consider and discuss their past experiences in explicit detail from the time of their fi rst 
memories. This process assumes that patients will eventually stumble upon long-hidden 
crises, traumas, and confl icts that are producing anxiety in their adult lives. They will 
then be able to “work through”—understand and rectify—those diffi culties.