Most people heard about Sigmund Freud some people heard about Carl Gustav Jung but very little people actually know the broader school of thought that their theories belong to, which is called the "Psychodynamic Approach". Hi, my name is Alina, I'm a graduate student of Clinical Psychology and today I'm very excited to give you a brief introduction into psychodynamic therapy and theory, so that hopefully you will have a better idea about how you can pull knowledge from this vast pool of theories and diverse opinions so that you can live a better and meaningful life. Now before we start with introducing you to the common features, core assumptions of psychodynamic therapy, I would like to clarify some terminology because this can get very very confusing.
You might have heard the terms psychoanalytic, psychodynamic and depth psychology. In most literature those three terms are used interchangeably. Some authors also have some preferences so you might want to check if you're reading a book what the author understands is psychodynamic or psychoanalytic or depth psychology in his or her opinion.
For me on this channel I'm going to also be using those three terms more or less interchangeably however if I talk about Sigmund Freud specifically then I will probably use the term psychoanalytic because this is the term that mostly refers to specifically his ideas. I already mentioned the term psychodynamic theory and psychodynamic therapy. When Freud started this school of thought he was not just trying to develop a treatment for mental illness but also a theory to understand human development, human nature what it means to be human, how we become who we are in general.
So in Freud's case he developed a psychoanalytic theory and based on that he developed a treatment for mental illnesses which he called psychoanalysis. After Freud there have been many different psychodynamic theories and many different treatment models. There have been long-term psychodynamic approaches, there have been brief psychodynamic treatments so by now from freud who really favoured this long-term treatment there is now a huge diversity in the psychodynamic field and while the psychodynamic approach is incredibly diverse, I mean really psychodynamic is just an umbrella term for a whole range of theories and ideas, there are some common shared characteristics of all those theories and so first of all I would like to share with you the common basic assumptions of the psychodynamic approach.
The first one is the developmental perspective that means the psychodynamic approach places a huge importance on early childhood experiences they basically think that in your early childhood you get a blueprint of how life works, how relationship works, how you're supposed to regulate yourself. And this blueprint is something that you will carry with you for the rest of your life even though Freud always gets displayed as someone who basically thought childhood was everything and I mean the whole tell me about your mother has been pretty much caricature-ized but actually he was also one of those people who warned against oversimplifying development. He wrote: "The synthesis is thus not so satisfactory as the analysis in other words from a knowledge of the premises we could not have foretold the nature of the result" This means we can know everything that happened in your childhood but that doesn't mean we can predict how exactly your life is going to turn out.
Now within the psychodynamic approach there are different people who place different emphasis on childhood there are some who work especially in the Freudian lineage who place a great emphasis on childhood experiences and then there are other theories such as Alfred Adler who doesn't really care that much about childhood and doesn't really think it defines you in the way that other theorists do. While a lot of theories are focused on childhood development there are also people like Erik Erikson who developed a developmental model that really takes the whole lifespan into account so from the day you're born until the day you die he describes the different developmental stages you go through and the different conflicts you have to resolve. The second shared characteristics is transference.
Remember the blueprint I just talked about? Transference means that templates of past relationships and ways of thinking influence current relationships and perceptions. This in turn is closely related to attachment theory which is another very important theory that was developed within the psychodynamic approach.
I'm pretty sure you heard about secure attachment style, anxious attachment style, avoidant attachment style and that means that the way you were attached to your primary caregiver (your mom, your dad, another person that took care of you) is going to influence the way you approach relationships later in life which means that the template you develop about how relationships work and how people are there for you - or not - is going to influence how you assume that later on. The reason that transference is so important in the psychodynamic approach is because the therapist and your older caregiver are not the same person. Which means they're not going to behave the same way and because you will find out as a patient in therapy that your therapist acts very different to your caregiver, you suddenly have the opportunity to learn a new template, to develop a new template that is going to be much more adaptive.
The third and probably most well-known common feature is unconsciousness. There are factors outside of the individual's awareness that play an important role in explaining the development and maintenance of psychopathology. Discovering and dealing with the unconscious used to be quite the unique selling point of psychodynamic theory but now is pretty much everywhere.
It has been discovered in neuroscience, in social psychology, in cognitive science so the unconsciousness has been accepted into the broader scientific and cultural field. The thing with unconscious motivation is that people assume that it's your consciousness against your unconsciousness but that is not true almost all the conflicts that you experience actually take place in your unconsciousness but this is going to be something we're going to talk about in a different video. Next up in the common features is the person-oriented perspective in the psychodynamic approach.
The focus is on understanding the whole person including strengths and vulnerabilities. Now you can see that especially in psychoanalysis (which really focus on the whole person and tries to take the whole personality into account and change the whole personality and not just focus on the one presenting problem that the patient comes to therapy with) still also shorter psychodynamic approaches tend to focus a bit more on the problem but they also want to find out how the problem actually serves the person. Because in a psychodynamic approach it is not assumed that a depression is just something to get rid of, that a depression is just a problem but it's also something that serves you in one way or another.
So before they try to get rid of the depression, they try to treat the depression, they want to understand why it's there in the first place. And in order to understand that, you have to take the developmental perspective into account, you have to take an account into account unconscious motivation and with that you try to understand the person as a whole and why this particular problem presents in a way. That is good because it doesn't reduce the person down to its problem.
On the other hand it can also be bad because sometimes it leads to treatments that are way too long and could be much more focused and efficient. The fifth common feature is recognition of complexity. Going to therapy is not a linear approach.
It is not always you do not always get better and better and better there are also times where you regress which means that you get worse and there are times when you progress which means that you get better. A lot of different developments can happen in the same therapy, they affect one another, they interact with one another. So it's not a straightforward process.
It's very complex. The last common feature shared among different psychodynamic approaches is the continuity between normal and abnormal. It is not one or the other.
You're always moving on a spectrum. Especially the psychodynamic approach recognises how vulnerable humans are to developing mental illness because there's so many developmental tasks, there's so many factors influencing us that it's very hard to survive this life without ever venturing from mental health into mental illness. Now besides these common assumptions there are also some very specific treatment features that set the psychodynamic approach apart from let's say the cognitive behavioral approach or the systemic approach or the humanistic approach you name it.
Some of these features are really incredibly specific to the psychodynamic approach and for some others it's just that a psychodynamic therapist would pay more attention or put a greater focus on these features but they are also present in other approaches. Number one is the greater focus on emotions instead of thoughts. Now especially in cognitive behavioral therapy there is a great emphasis on thoughts and in the psychodynamic and also in other approaches there is a much greater emphasis on emotions.
That means in a psychodynamic therapy you might to much greater detail work with difficult emotions such as aggression, anger, sadness and not just with the thoughts surrounding them. The second specific treatment feature is called "exploring the defenses". Maybe you already heard of defense mechanisms which is everything that we apply in order to not be confronted with things we don't want to be confronted with.
So that means in psychodynamic therapy a therapist will always pay special attention to how a patient is avoiding certain topics or emotions. The third specific feature is what patterns come back. This is something psychodynamic therapist is going to pay great attention to what are the parallels between how you grow up and how you behave now.
The fourth specific treatment feature might be very obvious but it is a great focus on the past. It can happen that in a psychodynamic therapy you will be encouraged to explore your childhood, see how you're related to your parents when you were young, if there were any defining events that happened and shaped you into the person who you become today. On the other hand it is not that if you go to a psychodynamic therapist they will have you talk about your childhood at infinitum without any reason.
Probably they will start exploring the problem that you came with to therapy and then they're going to see if there are any connections to earlier experiences. So don't be scared, you will not have to talk about your mom and your dad all the time. The fifth important feature is the focus on interpersonal relationships.
Hello transference, here we go again! It is very important to see how you relate to people. And not just how you relate to other people but also how you relate to the therapist.
The sixth point for some people is the most interesting one, for other people it's the most weird one for other people it's the most whoo-whoo one and that is exploring wishes, dreams and fantasies. This is where dream interpretation which Freud and also Jung have written a great deal about comes into play. And again this can be a source about what is going on in your consciousness, what you might be suppressing but it is not that in psychodynamic therapy your therapist will ask you every time to tell them about your dreams.
Now I hope this gave you some information about what psychodynamic therapy and what psychodynamic theory is and I'm very very excited to explore every of these points in more detail. So if you don't want to miss it, feel free to subscribe! I'm very much looking forward to seeing you next time.
Bye!
