Stan is undergoing psychoanalytic therapy to address difficulties in relationships with women stemming from his childhood experiences. The therapy focuses on exploring Stan's unconscious motivations and repressed memories from his early life. Specifically, it aims to help Stan understand how his negative relationship with his domineering mother has caused him to generalize fears and feelings of inadequacy to all women. Through analyzing transference in therapy sessions and reliving early experiences, Stan can gain insight into how his past shaped his behaviors and address issues at their root so he is no longer controlled by unconscious drives. The end goal is an integrated self and ability to have healthier relationships.
Stan is undergoing psychoanalytic therapy to address difficulties in relationships with women stemming from his childhood experiences. The therapy focuses on exploring Stan's unconscious motivations and repressed memories from his early life. Specifically, it aims to help Stan understand how his negative relationship with his domineering mother has caused him to generalize fears and feelings of inadequacy to all women. Through analyzing transference in therapy sessions and reliving early experiences, Stan can gain insight into how his past shaped his behaviors and address issues at their root so he is no longer controlled by unconscious drives. The end goal is an integrated self and ability to have healthier relationships.
Stan is undergoing psychoanalytic therapy to address difficulties in relationships with women stemming from his childhood experiences. The therapy focuses on exploring Stan's unconscious motivations and repressed memories from his early life. Specifically, it aims to help Stan understand how his negative relationship with his domineering mother has caused him to generalize fears and feelings of inadequacy to all women. Through analyzing transference in therapy sessions and reliving early experiences, Stan can gain insight into how his past shaped his behaviors and address issues at their root so he is no longer controlled by unconscious drives. The end goal is an integrated self and ability to have healthier relationships.
Stan is undergoing psychoanalytic therapy to address difficulties in relationships with women stemming from his childhood experiences. The therapy focuses on exploring Stan's unconscious motivations and repressed memories from his early life. Specifically, it aims to help Stan understand how his negative relationship with his domineering mother has caused him to generalize fears and feelings of inadequacy to all women. Through analyzing transference in therapy sessions and reliving early experiences, Stan can gain insight into how his past shaped his behaviors and address issues at their root so he is no longer controlled by unconscious drives. The end goal is an integrated self and ability to have healthier relationships.
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88 PART TWO <5fi Theories and Techniques of Counseling
Psychoanalytic Therapy Applied to the Case of Stan
still suffering from this deprivation and still desperately
searching for approval and acceptance from others. Stan's gender-role identification was fraught with dif- in each of the chapters in Part 2, the case of Stan is ficulties. He learned the basis of female-rnale relation- used to demonstrate the practical applications of the ships through his early experiences with his parents. theory in question. To give you a focus on Stan's central What he saw was fighting, bickering, and discounting. concerns, refer to the end of Chapter 1, where his His father was the weak one who always lost, and his biography is given. I also recommend that you at least mother was the strong, domineering force who could skim Chapter 16, which deals with an integrative and did hurt men. Stan generalized his fear of his approach as applied to Stan. In Chapters 4 through 14 mother to all women. It could be further hypothesized you will notice that Stan is working with a female that the woman he married was similar to his mother, therapist. Given his feelings toward women, it may seem both of whom reinforced his feelings of impotence. odd that he selected a woman for his therapist However, The opportunity to develop a transference rela- knowing that he had difficulty with women, he consciously tionship and work through it is the core of the therapy made this choice as a way to challenge himself. As you will process. An assumption is that Stan will eventually re- see, one of Stan's goals is to learn how to become less late to his therapist as he did to his mother and that intimidated in the presence of women and to be more the process will be a valuable means of gaining insight himself around them. into the origin of his difficulties with women. The ana- The psychoanalytic approach focuses on the uncon- scious psychodynamics of Stan's behavior. Considerable attention is given to material that he has repressed. At the extreme Stan demonstrated a self-destructive ten- dency, which is a way of inflicting punishment on him- self. Instead of directing his hostility toward his parents and siblings, he turned it inward toward himself. Stan's preoccupation with drinking could be hypothesized as evidence of an oral fixation. Because he never received love and acceptance during his early childhood, he is lytic process stresses an intensive exploration of Stan's The therapist is likely to explore some of these past. The goal is to make the unconscious conscious, questions with Stan; "What did you do when you felt so that he will no longer be controlled by unconscious unloved?" "As a child, what did you do with your nega- forces. Stan devotes much therapy time to reliving and tive feelings?" "Could you express your rage, hostility, exploring his early past. As he talks, he gains increased hurt, and fears?" "What effects did your relationship understanding of the dynamics of his behavior. He be- with your mother have on you?" "What did this teach gins to see connections between his present problems you about all women?" Brought into the here and now and early experiences in his childhood. Stan explores of the transference relationship, questions might in- memories of relationships with his siblings and with clude "When have you felt anything like this with me?" his mother and father and also explores how he has and "What are you learning from our relationship about generalized his view of women and men from his view how relationships with women might go?" of these family members. It is expected that he will The analytic process focuses on key influences in reexperience old feelings and uncover buried feelings Stan's developmental years, sometimes explicitly, related to traumatic events. From another perspective, sometimes in terms of how those earlier events are apart from whatever conscious insight Stan may being relived in the present analytic relationship. As acquire, the goal is for him to have a more integrated he comes to understand how he has been shaped by self, where feelings split off as foreign (the id) become these past experiences, he is increasingly able to more a part of what he is comfortable with (the ego). exert control over his present functioning. Many of The relationship with his therapist, where old feelings Stan's fears become conscious, and then his energy have different outcomes from his past experiences does not have to remain fixed on defending himself with significant others, can result in deep personality from unconscious feelings. Instead, he can make new growth.