What does Holistic mean?
Holistic
is the adjectival form of “Holism” (from λος holos, a Greek word
meaning all, entire, total). It is the idea that the properties of
a given system (biological, chemical, psychological, social,
economic, linguistic, etc.) cannot be determined or explained by the
sum of its component parts alone. Instead, the system as a whole
determines in an important way how the parts behave. The general
principle of holism was concisely summarized by Aristotle in the
Metaphysics: "The whole is more than the sum of its parts."
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What is Holistic Psychology?
Mainstream psychology, like mainstream medicine typically attempts
to examine, isolate and treat this or that problem “behavior”
(symptom) as opposed to looking at and treating the whole person.
Yet, even if we add up all a person’s “behaviors”, problematic or
not, the picture would still be different than considering the
person as a whole. The fact that the whole person is greater than a
sum of his or her behaviors is usually ignored by mainstream
psychology.
Holistic
Psychology by definition considers human “behaviors” in relationship
to the human organism as a whole. It views problem “behaviors”
(symptoms) not as discrete dysfunctions to be isolated and removed,
but as warning signs telling us there are imbalances and/or problems
in the working of the system as a whole. It looks to correct these
systemic problems, rather than just treating the symptom. (Think of
the difference between treating recurrent headaches with aspirin,
and discovering that they occur due to the subtle flicker of
fluorescent lighting at the office and replacing the bulbs.) Once
the system is re-regulated the warning signs/symptoms disappear.
They are no longer needed. To this end holistic psychotherapy
considers many psychological factors seemingly unrelated to the
symptom, as well as such seemingly non-psychological factors as
nutrition and exercise, spirituality, intuition, social and economic
relations, cultural influences, birth order and many more.
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What is Ecological Psychology (or
Ecopsychology)?
While the
human mind is shaped by the modern social world, it is readily
inspired and comforted by the wider natural world because that is
where it originally evolved. Human psychology therefore cannot be
understood as only intrapsychic phenomena or social relations, but
has also to include the relationship of humans to ecosystems and
other species. These relations have a deep evolutionary history,
natural affinity with the structure of the brain and deep psychic
significance in the present time, in spite of urbanization. Humans
are dependent on healthy nature not only for their physical
sustenance, but for their mental health.
Ecopsychology
considers human links and bonds with nature because when nature is
explored and viewed without judgment, it can give the healing
sensation of harmony, balance, timelessness and stability.
Ecopsychology recognizes that without the influence of nature,
humans are prone to a variety of delusions whereby they can become
self-centered, alienated and insensitive.
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What is Psychoanalytic Therapy?
Psychoanalytic
therapy (a term that refers to both psychoanalysis and
psychoanalytic psychotherapy) is a treatment for relieving mental
and emotional distress. It is based upon the hypothesis that all our
actions, thoughts and feelings are influenced by unconscious
processes. Disturbances in these processes produce troubling
symptoms like anxiety, depression, unusual fears, obsessions etc.
People are often
able to forget painful experience, an ability that can be a blessing
and even vitally necessary in the short run. Trauma, humiliations,
seemingly irresolvable conflicts between desires and inhibitions or
between differing desires, painful memories - all can be rendered
unconscious. But this ability is a mixed blessing. For these
things can haunt us. Although “forgotten,” they can still affect us
by disturbing normal unconscious emotional regulation.
Symptoms are
messages telling us something is wrong. We know today that a fever
is a symptom of infection. Yet in times past people misread that
message, perhaps as the sign of an evil spirit. So a symptom is
rather like a message that has been encrypted. The message exists,
but one needs a key to understand it.
By inviting a
patient to talk, and listening carefully, the psychoanalytic
therapist can help “decrypt” the symptoms. Rejected needs,
motivations, wishes, inhibitions, conflicts, and memories underlying
the symptom are made conscious. Once conscious, these can
be worked through and integrated into our lives, giving us greater
strength, assuredness and wisdom. Normal unconscious regulation is
restored, and the symptom disappears.
This form of
treatment for emotional troubles was first developed by Sigmund
Freud in the early part of this century. Psychoanalysts have since
expanded on Freud's work and enlarged the range of problems that can
be treated.
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Who can Benefit from Psychoanalytic Therapy?
Psychoanalytic
therapy is usually appropriate for anyone who wants to live a
happier life with greater personal and emotional freedom.
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What Kinds of Problems can be Treated with
Psychoanalytic Therapy?
A wide range of
emotional problems can be successfully treated with psychoanalytic
therapy. Among them:
-
Emotional pain,
depression, boredom, restlessness.
-
An inability to
learn, love, work, or express emotion.
-
Irrational fear,
anxiety without a known cause.
-
Pervasive
feelings of meaninglessness, emptiness, unrelatedness.
-
Lack of goals,
values, or ideals.
-
The feeling of
being overwhelmed by responsibility and unable to relax and
play.
-
An inability to
set practical, reachable goals, and accept responsibility.
-
Unsatisfying
relationships with spouse, children, or parents.
-
Inability to
have friends or lovers.
-
The feeling that
life is totally out of control and that one is not master of
one's fate.
-
An excessively
controlled life, dominated by ritual and obsession.
-
Compulsive
overeating, or an inability to eat enough for good health.
-
Physical
problems that have a psychological origin.
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What does the Psychoanalytic Therapy Patient
do?
The psychoanalytic
patient is a partner with her therapist in a unique exploration of
her life. Just as no two human beings are alike, no two treatments
are alike. There are no specific topics. The patient can
say anything she wants to say, but she doesn't have to talk about
anything she would rather not discuss. Dreams, fantasies, sexual
thoughts, angry thoughts, and feelings about herself and others are
shared in a comfortable manner. Over the course of time, the patient
is helped by the therapist to tell the emotionally significant story
of her life, permitting unconscious motives, fears, and memories to
become integrated into current life.
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What does the Psychoanalytic Therapist do?
The major function
of the psychoanalytic therapist is to listen carefully and
attentively to the patient in order to understand him and facilitate
communication. The therapist uses both intelligence and feelings to
obtain verbal and nonverbal clues to the patient's problems. The
analyst must first understand these disguised communications and
then transform them into information useful to the patient. The
therapist may ask questions to help the patient share his thoughts
and feelings comfortably.
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What is the Unconscious?
The unconscious is
composed of many mental processes, wishes, needs, attitudes,
memories, and beliefs not directly available to ordinary awareness.
It is hard for many people to accept the idea of the unconscious,
the idea that something not under their direct control might
influence their lives. However, close examination shows that many
choices in life such as spouse, friends, career, life style, and
patterns of health are based upon motivations of which people are
not ordinarily aware. Difficult childhood experience for instance,
although relegated to the unconscious, can still control day-to-day
behavior. Handicapped by lack of awareness of the unconscious
motivations, people can become victimized by emotional reactions and
symptoms that inhibit their lives. Psychoanalytic therapy allows a
patient to become aware of these unknown mental processes through
behavior, slips of the tongue, dreams, and free associations.
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Why are Dreams Important in Psychoanalytic
Therapy?
Dreams play a useful
role in psychoanalytic therapy because they express unconscious
needs, memories, conflicts and wishes. Dreams can become an avenue
of understanding to hidden aspects of the self when examined with
the interpretive help of the analyst.
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Why is the Couch often used?
Sometimes the butt
of jokes and cartoons, the couch is a much misunderstood, but useful
tool in advancing the treatment process. For most psychoanalytic
patients, it offers an opportunity to relax, undistracted by the
therapist's visible presence, and comfortably report thoughts, and
feelings as they arise. The use of the couch also emphasizes that
therapy is not ordinary social conversation, but a specialized form
of communication.
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What is Resistance?
During the course of
every psychoanalytic therapy, the patient demonstrates behavior that
interferes with the progress of the treatment. This interference is
called resistance. Because psychoanalytic therapy helps the patient
achieve freedom of thought and action by talking freely, the
negative emotional forces that caused his symptoms manifest
themselves as obstacles to the talking therapy. The patient may:
-
Become unable to
talk any longer.
-
Feel he has
nothing to say.
-
Need to keep
secrets from his therapist.
-
Withhold things
from the therapist because he is ashamed of them.
-
Feel that what
he has to say isn't important.
-
Repeat himself
constantly.
-
Refrain from
discussing certain topics.
-
Want to do
something other than talk.
-
Desire advise
rather than understanding.
-
Talk only about
thoughts and not feelings.
-
Talk only about
feelings and not thoughts.
These and many other
forms of possible resistance keep the patient from learning about
himself, growing and becoming the person he wants to be. Together
the patient and the analyst study the meaning and purpose of the
resistance and try to understand the key to unlocking it and
allowing the patient to continue growing. Therapists recognize that
a patient may need to resist, and use a relaxed approach to
aid him in overcoming the problem.
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What is Transference?
Psychoanalysts
discovered early in their work that patients views of the analyst may be unrealistic. An analyst with a quiet, reserved manner
may be perceived as an oppressive tyrant. Alternatively, a patient
may become convinced that the analyst is in love with her even
though no such feeling has been expressed. These types of feelings
often derive from attitudes toward significant individuals in a
patient's past such as parents, teachers, or siblings. Sometimes the
feelings toward the analyst represent actual feelings about a
person in the patient's past, and sometimes the feelings are those
of a desired relationship with a significant individual,
while at other times they may be the result of more or less accurate
perceptions of the analyst. Re-experiencing these feelings in the
context of the analytic relationship allows a person to work them
through consciously, in a way they could not when small and
powerless.
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Does Psychoanalytic Therapy focus only on
Childhood Events?
Events in the first five or six years of life do have an important
and lasting effect on the development of character. However, there
are many factors that affect a person’s present-day mental and
emotional states. The past is important only if it interferes
with the patient's ability to function in the present. The
therapist helps a patient whose emotional disorder is rooted in
childhood distress grow as an adult.
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How Long does Psychoanalytic Therapy take?
There is no time
limit on psychoanalytic therapy. Some patients may have benefits in
a short period of time (six months or less), and others may wish to
continue treatment for some years. The average patient remains in
therapy for a minimum of two years. Staying in therapy longer is
neither a sign of excessive dependence nor severity of illness. It
takes a lifetime to develop the attitudes and character traits that
contribute to emotional stress, and generally, although not always,
time is required for change. A therapist of any persuasion who
promises change in a specified period of time is not being
completely honest.
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When is Therapy Completed?
Therapy is
terminated when the goals of the patient have been achieved. When
the patient is able to comfortably experience all of her feelings,
both good and bad, without having to act them out, and when she is
able to comfortably relate all of these feelings to the analyst and
act in her own best interest, the therapy is complete.
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How has Psychoanalysis Changed since Freud?
Psychoanalytic
theory and therapy have both evolved since Sigmund Freud. Freud
placed his greatest theoretical emphasis on the study of the sexual
drives, in particular the Oedipal phase of psychosexual development
between the ages of four and six when a child falls in love with a
parent. Since the time of Freud, greater emphasis has been placed
upon the study of how an individual emerges into the world as a
separate person with a sense of himself and positive self-esteem.
Current theory also deals with aggression, early mother-child
interaction, social relations, family dynamics and psychosomatics.
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Are there Different Schools of Psychoanalytic
Therapy?
Since the birth of
Freudian analysis in the early 1900's numerous approaches have been
developed including those of Jung, Adler, Horney, Sullivan, Klein,
Kohut, etc. Each school of psychoanalytic therapy focuses on certain
aspects of treatment or personality. The differences between these
schools have become less dramatic with time. Frequently, the
differences between analysts trained in the same tradition can be
equal to or greater than those between analysts of different
schools.
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What are Some of the Differences between
Psychoanalytic Therapy and Other Forms of Therapy?
There are literally
hundreds of types of psychotherapy available to the public, and it
would be useful to understand something about each of them before
selecting a therapist. Unfortunately, much of what has been written
or said about psychoanalytic therapy has been by people who have
little experience of advances in the field of psychoanalysis. One
element that sets psychoanalytic therapy apart from other forms of
psychotherapy is:.
-
The
psychoanalytic therapist does not usually give specific
recommendations about how the patient ought to manage his life
or solve problems. Instead, the analyst prefers to help the
patient understand why he is unable to solve problems or what
internal conflict is preventing him from knowing what to do in
his life. When necessary, the analyst may suggest postponing a
particular decision until a later date, or may act to prevent a
patient from harming himself or sabotaging the treatment.
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Can a Person Change by Exerting Willpower?
A strong-willed
person may certainly modify the symptoms of emotional problems by
willpower, but the unconscious will then often express itself in a
different symptom. Certainly many people have radically changed the
form and substance of their lives without psychoanalytic therapy,
but emotional distress caused by unconscious conflict can only be
adequately met by psychoanalytic therapy.
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Is it Possible to Analyze Oneself?
Most people have
such a high degree of resistance that an insight gained by
self-analysis tends to be either superficial or confirm already-held
beliefs, rather than promote change. Of course, many have tried and
benefited to some extent from self-analysis, but a regimen of
regularly scheduled appointments, combined with the assistance of an
experienced analyst, is vital to the process. In addition, much of
who we are is determined by our relationships with other people. An
analyst provides an opportunity to observe ourselves in a close
relationship and safely try out new ways of relating to others.
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How is the Psychoanalytic Therapist Trained?
The psychoanalyst is
the most rigorously trained of all therapists. In order to practice,
a psychoanalyst must complete a deep personal analysis, complete a
comprehensive course of theoretical training, and treat patients
under the supervision of senior analysts. This training is usually
not available at universities or graduate schools. Most
psychoanalysts are trained at independent training institutes.
Psychoanalysts usually have had prior training as psychiatrists,
psychologists, social workers, mental health counselors or nurse
practitioners. Analysts may have the degree M.D., Ph.D., M.S.W.,
M.A., or M.S.N. Psychoanalytic training usually takes five to ten
years because the trainee must experience the treatment in-depth
himself, and he must treat cases under supervision until his
supervisors feel he is competent to practice independently. Unlike
graduate school courses lasting one or two semesters, this training
continues until supervisors, teachers and the trainee agree that it
is complete.
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How does One choose a Psychoanalytic Therapist?
A psychoanalytic
therapist should be either be a candidate at, or a certified
graduate of, an recognized training institute and have had
experience treating the problem the prospective patient is
experiencing. Having located a therapist, arrange for a trial
period of four to six sessions to determine whether you and the
therapist can work cooperatively together.
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Should the Therapist be Male or Female?
For most people the
sex of an analyst is not important. Exceptions might include
patients who have lost a parent in childhood and are often advised
to seek a therapist of the same sex as the lost parent; and
individuals who hold a strong antipathy toward one sex or the other
that might inhibit their treatment with a therapist of that sex.
Although many theories have been put forth in support of male or
female therapists for particular types of patients, these theories
have not held up over time. The bottom line is that a patient should
choose a therapist in whom he or she can feel trust and confidence.
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What do the “JD” and “MA” behind your name mean?
J.D. is an abbreviation for a doctoral degree in law (Juris
Doctor). I received mine in 1982. M.A. is an abbreviation for
Master of the Arts. I received mine, Master of the Arts in Clinical
Psychology, in 2001.
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What was your work prior to becoming a
psychotherapist?
After graduation from law school, I worked as a city and county
public defender, and later as federal public defender. For five
years I was an Examiner for the state of Montana Department of
Natural Resources, conducting hearings in contested administrative
cases, and making decisions based on the evidence given and the
law. For eight years I owned a private law practice in western
Montana. In 1998, I liquidated my Montana practice and moved to
Seattle to train in clinical psychology.
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Copyright
2006 Robert Scott |
