Analyse Psychodynamic / Humanistic Concepts for Attached Case Study

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The objective of this essay is to compare how key concepts from the psychodynamic and humanistic therapy approaches could assist the client in the attached case study (Appendix A, p. 12), a 20 year old female student who is presenting with anxiety. It will address the helping relationship, therapy timescales, physiological process of anxiety, psychological causes, intervention aims and how therapeutic change might occur. The aims of these therapies are significantly different because of their views about the causes of human distress and how the client can develop greater self understanding to alter behaviour. Psychoanalysis, originally founded by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) (evolved by Jung and Klein) believed that human beings possess innate drives to survive (known as Eros) but also to self-destruct (known as Thanatos or death drive) thereby holding the deterministic view that human behaviour is no accident. Freud believed that past experience (from childhood) shapes adult personality and behaviour is influenced by unconscious mental processes. The therapist facilitates exploration of the past and via a number of skilled interventions and interpretations helps makes unconscious material conscious. The Humanistic school of thought whose major contributor was Carl Rogers (1902-1987), through the development of his ‘Client-Centered Therapy’, adopted a more positive view of human nature insisting that behaviour is a personal choice (free will) and driven by the “...actualizing tendency, that force which moves us in the direction of well-being and the fulfilment of our potential” (Tolan, 2010, p. 110). He believed that humans possess an innate capacity for growth, can take responsibility for their actions and demonstrated the importance of six therapeutic conditions which help to foster the client’s natural ability towards improvement. This approach places
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