Core Principles and Characteristics
Although psychodynamic psychotherapy can take many forms, commonalities include:
- An emphasis on the centrality of intrapsychic and unconscious conflicts, and their relation to development.
- Seeing defenses as developing in internal psychic structures in order to avoid unpleasant consequences of conflict.
- A belief that psychopathology develops especially from early childhood experiences.
- A view that internal representations of experiences are organized around interpersonal relations.
- A conviction that life issues and dynamics will re-emerge in the context of the client-therapist relationship as transference and counter-transference.
- Use of free association as a major method for exploration of internal conflicts and problems.
- Focusing on interpretations of transference, defense mechanisms, and current symptoms and the working through of these present problems.
- Trust in insight as critically important for success in therapy.
Read more about this topic: Psychodynamic Psychotherapy
Famous quotes containing the words core and/or principles:
“The ideal of men and women sharing equally in parenting and working is a vision still. What would it be like if women and men were less different from each other, if our worlds were not so foreign? A male friend who shares daily parenting told me that he knows at his very core what his wife’s loving for their daughter feels like, and that this knowing creates a stronger bond between them.”
—Anonymous Mother. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 6 (1978)
“Though the ancients were ignorant of the principles of Christianity there were in them the germs of its spirit.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)