A Letter About Psychological Therapy

Hey, I know you asked me for advice about taking your mom to therapy. Well, don’t worry about it too much because therapy (thanks to people like Philippe Pinel and Dorothea Dix) is not like old times where they used to practice brutal treatments like beating people and stuff. Right now, there are three kinds of therapies. One of them is psychotherapy which is like, using psychological techniques. The second is a biomedical method which gives people medication. The last approach is an electric approach. And this last option is just basically blending the types together and it’s the most popular one.

There are many, many types of psychological therapies. There are many types because, you know, there are many branches in psychology. The main ones are psychoanalytic, humanistic, behavioral, and cognitive. The psychoanalytic one is what Sigmund Freud started. They call it psychoanalysis and they try to figure the origins of the problem usually by trying to know what happened in the person’s childhood. They also believe that people have to relax themselves from the conflicts that the id, ego, and superego have. The past methods are a bit different from today’s methods. In the past, Freud tried not really scientific stuff like hypnosis or free association which is just saying whatever comes to your mind. And you know, sometimes during free association you would pause before you say something embarrassing and they call this resistance. They try to interpret the resistance and try to find out your hidden wishes, feelings and stuff like that. Freud also believed in interpreting dreams and such. Oh, and there’s this thing called transference. So, during the therapy, the person might eventually have strong feelings toward the analyst (positive or negative) and they think this is because when the person reveals a lot of memories about things like relationships with other people, the person transfers these feelings toward the analyst. So, for example, you were talking to your therapist about your ex who you still love and you suddenly feel a strong positive feeling toward your therapist instead. The bad thing is that the interpretations can’t be really proven but they also can’t be disproven. Anyways, the therapists that are influenced by the psychoanalytic methods call themselves the psychodynamic therapists and they basically try to figure out the unconscious and how childhood experiences influenced the patient. They usually talk to the patients face to face regularly. Also, there is this thing called interpersonal psychotherapy where therapists try to help patients find the insight to roots of their problems. I read that this is very helpful in treating depression.

The second type of therapy is based on the humanistic perspective which focuses on individuals’ potential and stuff. So they try to help people to be satisfied with themselves by increasing self-acceptance. This humanistic therapy also tries to give insight like the one I talked about earlier so like, these two are often called insight therapies. But these two are totally different. Humanistic therapy focuses on present and future and conscious thoughts. It also focuses on taking responsibility for whatever the person is feeling, not trying find out hidden reasons and stuff. Also, the people who are in therapy are more treated as “clients” rather than “patients” because they encourage growth and not try to cure what’s wrong or something. So Carl Rogers was a humanistic psychologist and he created the client-centered therapy. This type of therapy is more like the therapist actively listening, rather than giving interpretations and stuff to the person. They try to be genuine, accepting, and empathic. I really like this therapy because they really try to use active listening which is when the therapist tries to echo back and asks questions to let the person clarify whatever the person is saying. This type of therapy also provides unconditional positive regard so the client can feel more accepted and stuff.

The third type I want to mention is behavior therapy. This therapy tries to really solve the problem. Like, what I mean by that is, you know, the first two I talked about only give insight to why you feel or behave in a certain way but this behavior therapy tries to let you learn to fix your problem. There are two ways you learn something and one of them is using classical conditioning. They usually try to fix phobias using counterconditioning which tries to evoke new responses rather than being so afraid of something. And there are two types of counterconditioning. One of them is called exposure therapies. Exposure therapies try to expose what the person fears slowly until the person doesn’t feel so sensitive about the object. The most popular exposure therapy is the systematic desensitization which is just relating something pleasant with what the person is afraid of while increasing