[HP1000] TUTORIAL 11
TA: Michelle Nee
Contact: mnee001@e.ntu.edu.sg
Review different types of therapies
Disorder diagnoses
Help students prepare final exams
▪Therapy for psychological disorders takes various forms, but all involve a
therapeutic relationship focused on improving a person’s mental, behavioural or
social functioning
Components of therapy
▪Therapeutic alliance: relationship between therapists and client, working together
to help client deal with mental or behavioural issues
▪Quality of alliance major factor in effectiveness of therapy
▪Trust and empathy vital
▪Therapist who can connect with people in the context of their own culture, experience
and native language
1. Identifying the problem : description of problem or formal diagnosis about what
is wrong
2. Identifying cause of problem or the condition that maintain the problem:
A. May involve searching the past, especially childhood for source of discomfort
B. Emphasizes present cause, conditions keeping problem alive
3. Deciding on and carrying out some form of treatment
A. Selecting specific type of therapy to reduce or eliminate symptom
B. Exact treatment depend on nature of problem and therapist’s orientation and training
▪Psychologists engage in 2 main forms of treatment
1. The insight therapies (focused on developing understanding of the problem)
A. Psychodynamic therapies
I. Freudian psychoanalysis
II. Neo-Freudian therapies
B. Humanistic therapies
C. Cognitive therapies
2. The behaviour therapies (focused on changing behaviour through conditioning)
A. Therapies based on operant conditioning
B. Therapies based on observational learning
C. Therapies based on classical conditioning
▪Talk therapies- assumption that distressed person need to develop understanding of disordered thoughts,
emotions, and motives that underlie mental difficulties
▪All aim at revealing and altering patient’s disturbed mental processes through discussions and interpretations
▪Freudian Psychoanalysis: probes unconscious to bring issues consciousness
▪Major goal: reveal and interpret unconscious mind’s contents
▪Major task: help patient break through barriers of repression and bring threatening thoughts to awareness
▪Patient understand current symptom and repressed conflict relationship, accept unconscious conflict and
desires
▪How so?
▪Via free association : patient relax and talk while therapist listen , alert for veiled references to unconscious
need and conflicts
▪Via dream interpretation
▪Note: Freud’s ideas no longer represent mainstream psychology but remain vital as many techniques carried
over to newer forms of therapy: ego, repression, unconscious, identification and Oedipus complex
▪Neo-Freudian psychodynamic therapies: embraced some idea but disagreed with
others
(3) Emphasises on
▪Significance of self or ego ( rather than id)
