2017-2018
Psychotherapy Literature Summary
Made by Maha Abdallah
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Week 1
Psychotherapy: a Brief Note on
Schools of Therapy (Keijsers)
Non-directive forms of therapy
• No direct influence from the therapist
• Consists of two principal schools
• Principal school 1
• Psychoanalysis: classical analysis with free association and
interpretation.
• Psychodynamic psychotherapy: uses forms of psychoanalysis that are
much compacter.
• Principal school 2
• Client-centered therapy: here the contact between patient and
therapist is central, and allows the patient to develop his true self.
• Two types of client-centered are humanistic psychotherapy and
existential psychotherapy. Existential therapy investigates core
themes of existence.
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Directive forms of therapy
• Emphasis is less on therapeutic relationship, and more on treatment
procedures, in which certain things are practiced. This practice finds
place during and outside therapy.
• Principal school 3
• Behaviour therapy: in this school learning processes play an
important role. Behaviour therapy is aimed at changing complaints/
symptoms instead of bringing this like self-insight.
• Cognitive therapy: this is a therapeutic school which holds that many
complaints/symptoms/disorders persist because of automatic
assumptions and views on the patient’s part, and is aimed at
changing those.
• Very often, behaviour and cognitive therapy are combined into
cognitive-behaviour therapy. There are many types of CBT, e.g.
hypnotherapy, solution-focused therapy, and acceptance and
commitment therapy (ACT).
• Hypnotherapy: possibilities of hypnosis are used to achieve
improvements in disorders.
• Solution-focused therapy: is a form of therapy that encourages
people to look less at the problems and more at possible solutions.
• ACT: is aimed at encouraging people to focus on relevant goals and
desired developments that can be brought within reach by means of
practice or making certain choices.
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Psychotherapy and Implicit Mental
Processes (Keijsers & Becker)
Introduction
• There are several characteristics that are typical of people with mental
problems.
1. First of all, mental problems involve undesired experiences. In other
cases, certain experiences are absent, whereas the patient wishes
that they would take place.
2. Secondly, these psychological problems are seen as insoluble, and
the patients cannot solve these problems on their own.
3. Thirdly, these problems are often seen as absurd. Even though the
perception of disordered people is absurd, they cannot simply step
out of it.
Implicit Mental Processes
• A dominant concept in literature on psychotherapy is that mental
disorders are caused when people become alienated from themselves.
• Modern psychopathology also holds the view that a mental disorder
points to disturbances in patients’ perceptions which are considered as
alienating and involuntary.
• In contrast to older studies, modern research does not show proof of
a central ego with accessible or inaccessible motives.
• The ego is nowadays thought to be just one part of the automatic
processes that finds place within us. Gazzaniga even asserts that to
see oneself as ‘actor of your actions’ is nothing but a by-product of
the human mind, and the ego is nothing more than a doorkeeper
keeping and eye on the monitors in a little room.
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• The fact that a large part of our information processing takes place
unconsciously does not mean that our reactions, emotions and
behaviour are fixed. We are able to have an influence through e.g.
conscious learning and through implicit learning.
Implicit Learning
• The repeated occurrence of particular situations that we experience as
pleasant or unpleasant leads to formation of S-R associations:
situational characteristics, emotions, and behaviours are coupled to one
another.
• A distinction is often drawn for propositional and schematic
representations of ourselves and the world.
• Propositional: are by nature linguistic, symbolic and factual These
representations enable us to reason logically and to use deductions to
arrive at a particular opinion.
• Schematic: are holistic by nature and consists of the integration of
linguistic, visual, auditory, tactile, and somatosensory information
that we have acquired through experiences with a particular subject.
Experimental Psychopathology
• The core of at least a number of common mental disorders lies in
undesired experiences whose tenacity and preservation are attributable
at least in part to adaptations in the implicit information processing
system.
• These adaptations can involve for example an attentional bias toward
sad stimuli in a depressed patient.
• It is important to realize that these maladaptive adaptations in
implicit processes can only for a small part be altered through talking
in therapy. What is needed instead of this is specific and systematic
training.
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Systematic and Focussed Practice
• Psychotherapeutic change implies that patients are enabled to perceive
their difficulties in a different way. This is done through lots of practice.
Insight
• It has been claimed that therapeutic change requires undermining
schematic representations. In addition, a relationship has been drawn
between schematic representations and neuroplasticity.
• Synaptogenesis is enabled when a large quantity of relevant
associations, emotions, and semantic information are simultaneously
activated.
Week 2
Behaviour Therapy: An Overview
(Keijsers)
Background of Behaviour Therapy
• Behavioural therapists focus on formulating and achieving goals in
terms of observable (overt) or reportable (covert) behavior.
• Most behavioral treatments are based on learning theories.
• Behaviour therapies belong to the most effective psychological
treatments and has always adopted a scientific view on treatment.
• Behaviour therapists are interested in finding out what maintains
maladaptive behaviours, in order to learn the patient how to behave
differently.
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