The Theories Are Of Importance To Counselling Psychology Essay

Each and every counselling approaches are based on some theoretical framework. A theory presents or supplies the counsellor a lens to look through the whole counselling process , the signs of concerns of the clients, and methods to work on accomplishing clients improvement. There are many theories used by counsellors, this essay will discussed four major theories approach by counsellors which are psychoanalytical theory, individual psychology, person centered, and behavioural theory.

MAJOR COUNSELLING THEORIES

Psychoanalytical Theory

A. Main Founder

Sigmund Freud was a Viennese psychiatrist from 1856 till 1939. At age 17, he entered the University of Vienna and became a student researcher in the institution of physiology and earned the title Doctor of Medicine at 1891. At the age of 30 he was married and had a daughter named Anna Freud. He began form a private practice, and became convinced that sexual conflict was the basis of neurosis during his work with patients. His insight was critically criticized by professionals which forces him to began the difficult and lonesome process of self-analysis and study of the unconscious, continuing on to serve his own subject. In the early 1900’s, his hard work was finally began to gain recognition by scholars. Freud worked 18‐hour every day and later began to work with William James, Alder, and Jung. Sigmund Freud died from bone cancer at the age of 85.

B. Model of Personality

Freud’s view one the nature of human is regard as to be dynamic, as energy and transformation are exchanged. Freud speaks of personality as a composition of three types of mind consciousness. The conscious mind is well aware of what is happening in the present. The preconscious mind hold information from the other two minds. While, the unconscious mind hold forgotten or hidden experiences and events (Freud, S. ,1933).

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There are three parts in personality as Freud stated and they are the id, the ego and the superego. The id is innate and is a component of the unconscious. It holds the basics of human intuition and genetic endowments. The id is driven by the pleasure principle, the tendency to move away from pain and towards pleasure. The id acts irrationally and impulsively and does not know the value of what is right and what is wrong. The second system that is form is called the ego, it works primarily in both the conscious and preconscious mind. The purpose or role of the ego is as a go-between for the id and the superego, mainly controlling desires and wishes. The ego is driven by reality and it’s ability is to communicate with the world outside with suitable activities and goals. The last system that appears will be the superego, it sets the ideal moral values and standards for the individual. The superego acts on moral principles which rewards the individual for following societal and parental commands.

C. Model of Health

Freud’s states that there are five psychosexual stages of development and if each stages results in fixation if leads frustration or overindulgence happens.

Oral Stage

Begins from birth to age of one year. Libido is centred in a baby’s mouth as satisfaction gains from putting any kind of stuffs in the mouth to satisfy libido, thus it’s id in working. This stage is characterized by mouth orientated, it involves action such as biting and sucking. Oral fixation may happens in later life where individuals still seeks pleasure from mouth oriented activities such as smoking, drinking alcohol which may lead to health problems.

Anal Stage mental health

Begins during 1 to 3 year of age. The libido is centred on the anus of the body where the child gains great satisfaction from defecating.  The child ego’s developed, he or she is aware that they are an individual with rights and their wishes may bring them into in their own right and that their wishes can bring them into conflicts. This stage is where toilet training is imposed by the guardian or the parents themselves. The process and results from toilet training can determine the child’s future rapport with authorities. Early or harsh toilet training can lead to the child becoming an anal-retentive personality who hates mess and is obsessively tidy. They can be stubborn and tight-fisted with their cash and possessions. That may lead too cautious and isolated themselves from the norms and developed negative mental health.

Phallic Stage

Phallic stage occurs throughout three to six years. Genitals and masturbation are the focus in this stages for males and females, this body parts became a new source of pleasure. The child becomes conscious of anatomical sex dissimilarity, which sparks the conflict between resentment, erotic attraction, rivalry, fear, and jealousy which Freud named the Oedipus complex for boys and the Electra complex for girls. It could result in continuous driving negative thoughts to the mind which may make one person mentally ill. Over exceed exploring one’s body leads to a high curiosity for sexual activity that tends to be unhealthy.

Latency

Latency happens at age 6 till puberty. As the definition for latent is “hidden” there isn’t any psychosexual development that is taking place, this stage can be considered as being in a in an inactive mode. Freud state that most sexual desires are suppressed at this stage, and energy can be divert towards hobbies, friendships and homework where it could develop new skills and gain new knowledge. Play at this stage tends to be with individuals of the same age or gender.

Genital

From puberty to adult, is the last and final stage called genital. It is a point in time of sexual experimentation and settling down with a lover.

Sigmund Freud opt heterosexual intercourse as the appropriate channel of the sexual impulse. Conflicts and fixations tends to avoid this with the consequence of the development of sexual perversions. For example, if an individual at the oral stage develop fixation, it possibly will result in a individual forming sexual pleasure mainly from oral sex and kissing instead of sexual activity. It may be inclined to have an effect on one’s individual health through unhealthy sex in the future if occurs fixation.

D. Model of Abnormality

Id, Ego and Superego tends to be in conflicts where the Id wants something, while the Ego is trying to postpone or thinking of how to obtained it, lastly, while Superego is making certain how the individual obtained it is in the accordance of moral value. When a child is disciplined or scolded, the acts by the child will be associated with anxiety. The child tends to feel threatened with the decreasing love from parent and becomes anxious. Anxiety is unpleasant, hence the child tries to get rid of it. If the cause is external the child runs away, oppositely if the cause is internal, the child needs to suppress the cause of the anxiety. Hence, abnormal behaviour is caused by anxiety due to conflicts between Id, Ego, Superego.

Freud believed that the fundamental dynamic forces motivating personality were Eros which are love and sex and Thanatos which are death and aggression. These paired forces are sense that hold a somatic basis but are expressed in the form of desires, actions, thoughts, feelings and fantasies. The individual frequently desires instant satisfaction of aggressive and sexual impulses. The demand for instant satisfaction directs to foreseeable conflicts with social regulations that insist on some control over aggression and sex. The individual is then required, regardless of the individual’s willingness, to develop inner controls or defence mechanisms that suppress aggressive and sexual and aggressive impulses from being expressed in uncontrollable eruption. The development of defence mechanisms constraint individuals from becoming aware of fundamental internal desires.

E. Model of counselling

1. The role of counsellor are to offer the client a sense of safety and acceptance and support the development of transference. The client without restraint discovers difficult bits and pieces and experiences from their past, getting hold of insight and progressing through unsettled matters while the counsellor or therapists who is an expert, makes interpretations about the client’s issues and life and regularly focus on childhood experiences. Within the patient‐analyst relationship, “the working alliance is based onthe relatively non‐neurotic, rational, realistic attitudes of the patient toward the analyst. This alliance is a precondition for successful analysis, because the rational attitudes allow the patient to trust and cooperate with the analyst…” (Prochasaka & Norcross 2002). In the analysis, transference is viewed as one of the most significant sources of content. Through impulses, displacement, defences and feelings associated to individuals in the past are transferred to the counsellor or therapist and this turn into the authentic content of psychopathology for analysis. Counsellors must be aware of how they react to their clients and also be aware of their own unconscious processes, as another source of precise interpretation.

2. The goals of therapy include aiding the client into the conscious the unconscious, guiding the client progress through a developmental psychosexual stage which became fixated or wasn’t resolved, helping the client tune in to the demands of society, work and intimacy.

3. Counsellors need to use techniques such as free association and dream analysis in order to accomplish integrated interpretation

Free Association is a process where the client express any thoughts without any constraints, restrictions or censorships.

Dream Analysis is a process where the client tells their counsellors about their dreams and the counsellor interprets the observable content and the hidden messages of the dream.

Individual Psychology

A. Main Founder

Alfred Adler is best known for his theory on individual psychology, the idea of the inferiority complex and the president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1910. Alfred Adler born in 1870, February 7 in Vienna, Austria experience rickets in his early years which disallowed him from walking till age four. His health conditions lead him to make a decision to become a physician. Adler became a ophthalmologist after graduated from the University of Vienna in 1895 with a medical degree, but later switched his career to general practice. Not long after Alder changed his interests toward the field of psychiatry. He was invited by Sigmund Freud in 1902 to join a psychoanalytic discussion group where the discussion is held each Wednesday at Freud’s home and sooner form the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He serves as the president for some till he left due to disagreement’s with Freud . In 1912, Alfred Adler form the Society of Individual Psychology. Adler’s theory emphasized that each and every person has a sense of inferiority. Every individuals work toward resolving this inferiority and affirm their superiority over others from child. Adler termed this situation as ‘striving for superiority’ and believed that this drive was the motivating force behind human behaviours, thoughts and emotions. Furthermore Adler’s theories have take part in a vital role in a number of areas including child development therapy and child development. He died at 1937.

B. Model of Personality

The Adlerian concept of social interest where the person is seen as a unified organism, is the individual’s feelings of being part of a whole, including both the past, present, and the future. He states that personality is unified and self-consistent.

Adler believed that individuals were primarily encouraged toward the feeling of being belonged and social interest is the result of social training rather than inborn. Adler emphasized that individuals struggle to become successful and get through the areas that they see as inferior. He state that it’s the process of individual’s growth as struggling for flawlessness. If feelings of inferiority aren’t resolved then formed an inferiority complex while those who overcompensated for feelings of inferiority formed a superiority complex. Adlerian theory stressed that is personal responsibility for how the individual chooses to translate and modify to life’s events or situations.

Adler states that Nomothetic principles guides personalty where the basic dynamic force is striving for a fictional goal which is superiority. It depends upon the level of social interest in goal striving to gain successful adaption to life. The fictional goals is the result of unconscious thinking that have no counterpart in reality. It mainly concerned about the future and starts during early years. Fictional conceptualizations become the first goals of what will become lifestyle and they are our effort to belong and be significant in the eyes of others.

There are many types of people

Ruling: Is dominant in relationships.

Getting: Is expectant and dependent.

Avoiding: Shies away from problems.

Driving: Is achievement oriented.

Controlling: Likes order and certainty.

Being victimized or martyred: Both like suffering.

Being good: Likes being competent and better.

Being socially useful: Cooperative and humble.

Adler also states that idiographic principles in his theory of personality. Where everyone has personal style of life. Style of life is molded by people’s creative power and is the whole pattern that have an effect on an individual’s thinking, behavior and feeling. He states that subjective perceptions shape their behaviour and personality.

C. Model of Health

Adler believes that individual’s subjective perceptions shape their personality and behaviour. Fictionalism propose that we construct a goal early in life and the goal lead our style of life and gives unity to our personalities. This teleological approach proposes that we are focused on our future goal or ends and not troubled about how the past produces some present effect. On the other hand, physical deformities implies that due to the reason we are weak, small and inferior, we build up a belief system about how to conquer these physical deficiencies and become big, strong, and superior. One might attain these strong characteristics but still show previous characteristics. There are individuals who use these inferiorities and shift toward psychological health and a practical style of life while others overcompensate and are motivated to suppress or isolated themselves from the society. Physical deficiencies do not make a particular style of life happened just like that; they basically just provide current motivation for accomplishing targeted future goals. Next is the unity and self-consistency of personality put forward that each individuals is special and inseparable and that the conception of inconsistent behaviour is not present. Adler put forward a number of methods that the individuals operates with unity and self-consistency

Organ dialect – The deficient organ leads the direction of the individual’s goal consciously and unconsciously. Conscious thoughts are those that are understood and perceived by the individual as helpful in striving for success while unconscious thought are those that are not helpful.

Individual’s behaviour that guided them to a healthy or an unhealthy style of life, largely depends on the degree of social interest they develop during childhood years.

Alder also states that a self-consistent personality structure develops into a person’s style of life. It is the flavour of a person’s life and it consist of a person’s feelings for others, goal, self-concept, and attitude toward the world. It is the interaction of environment, heredity, and the person’s creative power. People with a healthy, socially useful style of life express their social interest through action.

D. Model of Abnormality

Neurotics is one of the factor that underlies all types of maladjustments in underdeveloped social interest. Reasons is goals are set too high, living in their own worlds, have a inflexible and fixed lifestyle.

External factors that contribute to maladjustment include:

Exaggerated physical deficiencies which tends to lead to exaggerated feelings of inferiority because they overcompensate for their inadequacy which leads to being overly concerned for themselves and a lack of concern for others.

Pampered lifestyle which lies at the heart of most neuroses, they tend to have a low level of social interest because they want to maintain their dependency on the host, spoiled relationships which they gained from their guardians or parents. They are very de-motivated, impatient, unable to make up their mind, too sensitive, unstable emotions. Apart from that, due to parents giving too much aid in what they should do by themselves, they motivated them to develop feelings that incapable to solve problems themselves.

Safeguarding techniques are security devices that allow individuals to cover their inflated self-image and sustain their present style of life. Often occurs in neurotics, which help them avoid public disgrace. These include:

Giving excuses

Aggression

Depreciation (underestimate other individuals accomplishments)

Accusation (put responsibility on others when they fails and seek revenge)

Self-accusation (torture themselves and guild with the objective of harming others).

E. Model of Counselling

During the ccounseling process, the client-counseling relationship have to be characterized by egalitarian, cooperative, mutual and respectful. The counselor must go through the process of understanding the client by asking themselves on the aspect of how their clients behaves and how does their clients gains from the behaviors and so on. Counselors can use family atmosphere and constellation, early recollections, priorities, birth order, and dreams in their assessment and analysis.

The counselors can use variety of strategies to aid their clients.

Restatement: repeats the client’s terms to communicate understanding and develop clarity.

Interpretation: makes presumption, instincts and hypotheses to a step further. Centers the attention on the reasons for behaviors.

Nonverbal Behavior: The nonverbal behavior of the clients is also a source and compulsory in taking in to account during interpretation.

Paradoxical Intention: Requesting the client to expand the target behavior or makes inspection on their behavior to make them realize the silliness of their behavior.

Catching oneself: Guiding the client, to learn how to bring destructive behaviour into consciousness and bring it to a halt.

Midas Technique: Exaggerating the client’s neurotic demands.

Pleasing Someone: Facilitate clients back to the society. For example, the client is given a task to do something nice for someone in the public.

Person-Centered Theory

Main Founder

Carl Rogers was one of the six children to Walter Rogers and Julia Cushing and He was brought up by them in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois. Rogers personally experienced the devastating effects of parents imposing conditions of worth. Rogers study in a religious school and he is a child who loves studying. He intended to go to University of Wisconsin-Madison to study agriculture with undergraduate focus on religion and history.  

Rogers was brought up with a stern Pentecostal Christian faith. Around his early twenties, he began to question his Christianity after attending a Christian conference. He went into the seminary and leave after two years to take on a master’s at the Teachers College of Columbia University. In 1931, he began his professional career in child psychology after he received his Ph.D. Rogers became a director of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and taught at the University of Rochester. He continuously explores and put psychological issues facing children into attention when he took the position of professor of clinical psychology at Ohio State University and begin to wrote the book entitled Counseling and Psychotherapy, in which he theorized that a client could achieved the consciousness essential to change their life by developing a respectful, accepting relationship with their therapist and nonjudgmental.

Rogers founded the counselling centre when he was a professor at the University of Chicago. He formed the client-centered approach to psychotherapy and he wrote on of his most renown books entitled On Becoming a Person during his career at the University of Wisconsin, Madison as a professor. Rogers shifted to California in 1963 and eventually developed the Center for Studies of the Person. He remained in La Jolla, California until his sudden death in 1987.

Before he died, he worked hard to end oppression and cultural conflict during his final years. He give a helping hand in bringing together Protestants and Catholics in Ireland and fought to end apartheid in South Africa. Majorly, it was his humanistic theories that had the biggest impact on psychology.

B. Model of Personality

Roger believed that people are essentially good, are positively moving forward, realistic, and trustworthy and constructive. Each individual has the self-actualizing tendency which is the innate tendency of the organism to build up all its capacities (Rogers, 1959). In ways which serve to preserve or improve the organism which consist of not only the tendency to decrease tension, but also to satisfy physiological needs such as water and food. Roger believed that every individual has the capability of discovering personal life purpose and meaning.

Individuals are viewed from a Phenomenological perspective. Phenomenology is a philosophical approach to human nature or to the impossibility of having a human nature. Phenomenology emphasizes the subjective experience of the individual. It assumes that “existence precedes essence,” where existence is subjective experience and essence is human nature.

C. Model of Health

Roger believes that a person needs to be positively reared, meaning that an individual must be unconditionally showered with love, respect, warmth, care and give acceptance from their parents and others to develop the individual to a healthy person. Feelings of self worth can be formed if the individual behaves in particular ways as conditional acceptance let the individual realizes that only when conforming to others’ wishes they are able to feel valued. (Rogers, 1959)

D. Model of Abnormality

There is a tension between the ideal self which is what the person is striving to become and the real self of the individual which is who the individual is really are as they strive and struggle for acceptance. In order to become accepted, the individual frequently behaved in ways that were contrasting with the real self. Thus, the greater the disharmony between the real self and the ideal self, the more abnormal the individual became, and tends to be isolated by the norm or isolated themselves from the norm.

E. Model of Counselling

The counsellor needs to sets up and guides a atmosphere or environment in which the client is free and given the supports or motivations to discovers all aspects of themselves. The client‐counsellor relationship is the centre of attention and the therapists or counsellor need to be well aware of the client’s verbal and nonverbal behaviour and reflects that back to them. The counsellor lead the client to form an agenda on which the client wish to work on, hence the therapist is the process of expert and expert learner of the client.

The ultimate goal in the therapy is to raise congruence between the ideal self and the real self where goals are centered around the client as a person and not their problems and provide clients with assistance to learn how to cope with situations. Apart from that, another goal of the therapy, is facilitate client to develop a greater acceptance of self and others and become a better decision maker in the here and now. The therapist works on encouraging the client’s strengths to surface and to integrate these resources into their lives

In the process of therapy, with the comfortable atmosphere set up, clients are to take the initiative to inform the therapist about their personal experiences. The therapists is to actively listen and to be able to sensitively capture the essence of the client’s experience and go understanding but not make interpretation. Besides, the therapist needs to help the client relocate their attention, so that they can make greater use of the information generated by their own feelings. When the clients feel that the therapists is really attending to them, this will facilitate the client’s process in breaking through some of their perceptual rigidities or attend to things not previously attended to.

Rogers believes that there are three essential and sufficient core conditions of counselling (Rogers, 1957) :

Empathy ‐ the counsellor’s ability to feel with the client and convey this back to them

Positive regard and acceptance – is a deep and genuine caring for the client as a person prizing them just for being themselves.

Congruence (genuineness) – the process of being transparent in the therapeutic relationship

Behavioural Theory (B. F. Skinner)

A. Main Founder

B. F. Skinner born 1904 and died at 1990. B.F. Skinner was brought up at Pennsylvania and went through a stable and a warm life in his early years. When he was still a child he enjoyed constructing and creating new things which lead to him mastering the skills gain to be used in his studies in later years. In 1926, he gained a B.A. in English literature from Hamilton College. He struggles as a writer for some time and soon discovers the writings of Watson and Pavlov and become inspires by their work. He then make a decision to drop his career as a writer and went to Harvard University to enter the psychology graduate program at Harvard University. In 1936, Skinner married Yvonne Blue and have two children which are Julie and Deborah. In 1948, he joined the psychology department at Harvard University where he stays on for the rest of his life. He became one of the influential person for behaviourism and his findings and research contributed enormously to experimental psychology. He also invented the ‘Skinner box,’ in which a rat learns to obtain food by pressing a lever.

B. Model of Personality

B.F. Skinner stated that individuals varies in their learning experiences are the primary reason individuals differs in their behaviours (Sincero, 2013). The patterns of individuals can be directly through rewards and punishments or indirectly which are through observational learning or modelling. Skinner believed that it is merely the nature of human that individuals behave in certain ways in order to receive rewards or things that they favour. In order for an individual to experience reinforcement, an individual need to develop personality traits that are positive. For example, attributes comprised in the “agreeableness” category of the Big Five which are compassions, understanding, positive thinker and empathetic. Relating further, Skinner argued that individuals react to each type of reinforcement, and apart from that personality traits and behaviour is able to be controlled and shaped by the society. Furthermore, Skinner inferred that individuals must first changed the environment if individuals desires to changed their negative personality traits to positive personality traits.

C. Model of Health

Behavior modification works very well with children and is used on many psychological problems such as addictions, autism, even schizophrenia. For example, there are quite an amount of back-ward psychotics who had not communicate with other people for years and they were conditioned to behave quite normally, such as taking care of their cleanliness and eating with spoon and forks.

The token economy is used mainly in organizations such as juvenile halls, psychiatric hospitals and prisons. There are particular rules implemented in the institutions, where if an individuals follow rules and behave appropriately they are rewarded with tokens. On the other hand, If behave badly or poorly, results in withdrawal of token poor behaviour is also often followed by a withdrawal of these tokens. The tokens can be exchanged in for favourable things such as candy, cigarettes, games and movies. It had been found that behaviour modification is very effective in keeping the situations in these often difficult to handle institutions.

D. Model of Abnormality

If abnormal behaviour is followed by a reinforcing stimulus, where an individual will repeat the behaviour, thus, abnormal behaviour increases. Apart from that, generalization is gained if similar responses are reinforced. For example, if the child throws toys across the room and was punished by the parent. Instead of the expected response, the child throws even more toys across the room.

E. Model of Counselling

Roles of the behavioural counsellor varies as they can play the role as a reinforce, consultant or a facilitator. The counsellor must be active and observe people related to their clients to accomplish the goals of therapy. Besides, counsellors should use materials such as tests in their analysis. The goal of behaviourists counsellors is quite similar with other theories where they aim to improve their clients’ life through modifications and achieveing personal goals professionally.

Techniques used are such as negative or positive reinforces, shaping, behavioural rehearsal and punishment.

CONCLUSION

Using theories in counselling makes counselling more valid , reliable and professional,. The application of using theories in counselling have to be choose wisely in order to appropriately analyse clients situations and provide ways that is appropriate to solve clients concerns or issues.