Southeast Missouri State University
PY 101.03 Psychological Perspectives on Human Behavior
Instructor: Dr. Pollina
Written by: Geoffrey Tibbs
Psychoanalytic Therapy Psychoanalysis is a psychological approach to therapy that focuses primarily on the unconscious part of the mind. Therapists work and talk with their clients to help them bring their unconscious conflicts to the surface and solve them. Psychoanalysis can be a long process, but it can also be very helpful to the patient. Although psychoanalysis may not completely cure the patient, it has brought some improvement to people with dissociative identity disorder, helped change personality configuration, made improvements in children, played a …show more content…
Emily still struggles with her split personalities and does not fully trust herself or others, but she has found a way to live without as much difficulty. She has hope now, something she did not have before. Dr. MacIntosh feels that transferring Emily from the trauma models to psychoanalytic therapy was a good decision and that Emily benefitted from it, even if she was not completely cured (MacIntosh, 2014, p. 534-535). Another field in which psychoanalysis is used is in changing personality configuration. Psychoanalytical treatment usually involves changes in the patient’s psychological state, whether they are conscious or unconscious. According to the research of doctors Andrzej Werbart and Sonja Levander, psychoanalysis can increase or decrease the strength of certain traits in people (Werbart & Levander, 2015, p. 1). Werbart and Levander gathered information for their study from 1997 to 2008 at a Swedish psychotherapy institution. The participants consisted of fourteen clients who had consecutively received publicly-financed psychoanalytic treatments. The patients were divided into two groups: anaclitic (emotionally dependent) or introjective (adopts or believes views or opinions of others). The average length of therapy for the participants was a little bit over five years. After the therapy was over, each participant and his or her analyst was interviewed to see whether the treatment was …show more content…
According to Dr. Monica Carsky, supportive psychoanalytic therapy can be helpful and successful in the treatment of patients with a wide spectrum of disorders. In the Weill–Cornell randomized controlled trial of long-term treatments, patients on the verge of personality disorders were treated with supportive psychoanalytic therapy. These people all suffered from or had problems with depression, anxiety, anger, impulsiveness, functioning in the real world, and making social adjustments. After about a year of therapy, these patients had made substantial progress with their problems and functioning in many areas of life as well as in the therapy (Carsky, 2013, p.