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The universal system for empowering individuals and improving relationships.
Choice Theory® is based on the simple premise that every individual only has the power to control themselves and has limited power to control others. Applying Choice Theory allows one to take responsibility for one's own life and at the same time, withdraw from attempting to direct other people's decisions and lives. Individuals are empowered to take responsibility for their choices and support others in taking ownership of their choices. Negative behaviors reduce in frequency and intensity, relationships strengthen and satisfaction in life increases.

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The universal system for empowering individuals and improving relationships. Choice Theory® is based on the simple premise that every individual only has the power to control themselves and has limited power to control others. Applying Choice Theory allows one to take responsibility for one's own life and at the same time, withdraw from attempting to direct other people's decisions and lives.

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Featuring important theories and trends not covered in other foundational texts, this book is designed to equip the next generation of counselors with the tools they need for understanding the core dimensions of the helping relationship.

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Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939) was the founding father of psychoanalysis, a method for treating mental illness and a theory explaining human behavior.

Freud believed that events in our childhood have a great influence on our adult lives, shaping our personality. For example, anxiety originating from traumatic experiences in a person's past is hidden from consciousness and may cause problems during adulthood (neuroses).

Thus, when we explain our behavior to ourselves or others (conscious mental activity), we rarely give a true account of our motivation. This is not because we are deliberately lying. While human beings are great deceivers of others; they are even more adept at self-deception.

Freud's life work was dominated by his attempts to penetrate this often subtle and elaborate camouflage that obscures the hidden structure and processes of personality.

His lexicon has become embedded within the vocabulary of Western society. Words he introduced through his theories are now used by everyday people, such as anal (personality), libido, denial, repression, cathartic, Freudian slip, and neurotic.

Who is Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud, born on May 6, 1856, in what is now Příbor, Czech Republic (then part of the Austrian Empire), is hailed as the father of psychoanalysis. He was the eldest of eight children in a Jewish family.

Freud initially wanted to become a law professional but later developed an interest in medicine. He entered the University of Vienna in 1873, graduating with an MD in 1881. His primary interests included neurology and neuropathology. He was particularly interested in the condition of hysteria and its psychological causes.

In 1885, Freud received a grant to study with Jean-Martin Charcot, a renowned neurologist who used hypnosis to treat women suffering from what was then called "hysteria." This experience sparked Freud's interest in the unconscious mind, a theme that would recur throughout his career.

In 1886, Freud returned to Vienna, married Martha Bernays, and set up a private practice to treat nervous disorders. His work during this time led to his revolutionary concepts of the human mind and the development of the psychoanalytic method.

Freud introduced several influential concepts, including the Oedipus complex, dream analysis, and the structural model of the psyche divided into the id, ego, and superego. He published numerous works throughout his career, the most notable being " The Interpretation of Dreams" (1900), " The Psychopathology of Everyday Life" (1901), and " Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality " (1905).

Despite controversy and opposition, Freud continued to develop his theories and expand the field of psychoanalysis. He was deeply affected by the outbreak of World War I and later by the rise of the Nazis in Germany. In 1938, due to the Nazi threat, he emigrated to London with his wife and youngest daughter.

Freud died in London on September 23, 1939, but his influence on psychology, literature, and culture remains profound and pervasive.

He radically changed our understanding of the human mind, emphasizing the power of unconscious processes and pioneering therapeutic techniques that continue to be used today.

Sigmund Freud's Theories & Contributions

1. Psychoanalytic Theory: Freud is best known for developing psychoanalysis, a therapeutic technique for treating mental health disorders by exploring unconscious thoughts and feelings.

2. Unconscious Mind: Freud (1900, 1905) developed a topographical model of the mind, describing the features of the mind's structure and function. Freud used the analogy of an iceberg to describe the three levels of the mind.

3. Personality: Freud proposed a tripartite model of the human mind, composed of the id, ego, and superego. The id represents primal desires, the ego balances the id and reality, and the superego represents societal norms and morals.
The id, ego, and superego have most commonly been conceptualized as three essential parts of the human personality.

4. Psychosexual Development: Freud's controversial theory of psychosexual development suggests that early childhood experiences and stages (oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital) shape our adult personality and behavior.

His theory of psychosexual stages of development is predicated by the concept that childhood experiences create the adult personality and that problems in early life would come back to haunt the individual as a mental illness.

5. Dream Analysis: Freud believed dreams were a window into the unconscious mind and developed methods for analyzing dream content for repressed thoughts and desires.

Dreams represent unfulfilled wishes from the id, trying to break through to the conscious. But because these desires are often unacceptable, they are disguised or censored using such defenses as symbolism.

Freud believed that by undoing the dreamwork, the analyst could study the manifest content (what they dreamt) and interpret the latent content ( what it meant) by understanding the symbols.

6. Defense Mechanisms: Freud proposed several defense mechanisms, like repression and projection, which the ego employs to handle the tension and conflicts among the id, superego, and the demands of reality.

Sigmund Freud's Patients

Sigmund Freud's clinical work with several patients led to major breakthroughs in psychoanalysis and a deeper understanding of the human mind. Here are summaries of some of his most notable cases:

1. Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim): Known as the 'birth of psychoanalysis,' Anna O. was a patient of Freud's colleague Josef Breuer. However, her case heavily influenced Freud's thinking.

She suffered from various symptoms, including hallucinations and paralysis, which Freud interpreted as signs of hysteria caused by repressed traumatic memories. The "talking cure" method with Anna O. would later evolve into Freudian psychoanalysis.

2. Dora (Ida Bauer): Dora, a pseudonym Freud used, was a teenager suffering from what he diagnosed as hysteria. Her symptoms included aphonia (loss of voice) and a cough.

Freud suggested her issues were due to suppressed sexual desires, particularly those resulting from a complex series of relationships in her family. The Dora case is famous for the subject's abrupt termination of therapy, and for the criticisms Freud received regarding his handling of the case.

3. Little Hans (Herbert Graf): Little Hans, a five-year-old boy, feared horses. Freud never met Hans but used information from the boy's father to diagnose him.

He proposed that Little Hans' horse phobia was symbolic of a deeper fear related to the Oedipus Complex - unconscious feelings of affection for his mother and rivalry with his father. The case of Little Hans is often used as an example of Freud's theory of the Oedipal Complex in children.

4. Rat Man (Ernst Lanzer): Rat Man came to Freud suffering from obsessive thoughts and fears related to rats, a condition known as obsessional neurosis.

Freud connected his symptoms to suppressed guilt and repressed sexual desires. The treatment of Rat Man further expanded Freud's work on understanding the role of internal conflicts and unconscious processes in mental health disorders.

5. Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff): Wolf Man was a wealthy Russian aristocrat who came to Freud with various symptoms, including a recurring dream about wolves.

Freud's analysis, focusing on childhood memories and dreams, led him to identify the presence of repressed memories and the influence of the Oedipus Complex. Wolf Man's treatment is often considered one of Freud's most significant and controversial cases.

In the highly repressive "Victorian" society in which Freud lived and worked, women, in particular, were forced to repress their sexual needs. In many cases, the result was some form of neurotic illness.

Freud sought to understand the nature and variety of these illnesses by retracing the sexual history of his patients. This was not primarily an investigation of sexual experiences as such. Far more important were the patient's wishes and desires, their experience of love, hate, shame, guilt, and fear - and how they handled these powerful emotions.

Freud's Followers

Freud attracted many followers, who formed a famous group in 1902 called the "Psychological Wednesday Society." The group met every Wednesday in Freud's waiting room.

As the organization grew, Freud established an inner circle of devoted followers, the so-called "Committee" (including Sàndor Ferenczi, and Hanns Sachs (standing) Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, and Ernest Jones).

At the beginning of 1908, the committee had 22 members and was renamed the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

Neo-Freudians

The term "neo-Freudians" refers to psychologists who were initially followers of Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939) but later developed their own theories, often modifying or challenging Freud's ideas.

Here are summaries of some of the most notable neo-Freudians:

1. Otto Rank: Rank (1884 - 1939) was an early collaborator with Freud and played a significant role in the development of psychoanalysis. He proposed the "trauma of birth" as a critical event influencing the psyche. Later, he shifted focus to the relationship between therapist and client, influencing the development of humanistic therapies.

2. Harry Stack Sullivan: Sullivan (1892 - 1949) developed interpersonal psychoanalysis, emphasizing the role of interpersonal relationships and social experiences in personality development and mental disorders. He proposed the concept of the "self-system" formed through experiences of approval and disapproval during childhood.

3. Anna Freud: Freud's youngest daughter significantly contributed to psychoanalysis, particularly in child psychology. Anna Freud (1895 - 1982) expanded on her father's work, emphasizing the importance of ego defenses in managing conflict and preserving mental health.

4. Erich Fromm: Fromm (1900-1980) was a German-American psychoanalyst associated with the Frankfurt School, who emphasized culture's role in developing personality. He advocated psychoanalysis as a tool for curing cultural problems and thus reducing mental illness.

Critical Evaluation

Does evidence support Freudian psychology? Freud's theory is good at explaining but not predicting behavior (which is one of the goals of science).

For this reason, Freud's theory is unfalsifiable - it can neither be proved true or refuted. For example, the unconscious mind is difficult to test and measure objectively. Overall, Freud's theory is highly unscientific.

Despite the skepticism of the unconscious mind, cognitive psychology has identified unconscious processes, such as procedural memory (Tulving, 1972), automatic processing (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Stroop, 1935), and social psychology has shown the importance of implicit processing (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Such empirical findings have demonstrated the role of unconscious processes in human behavior.

However, most evidence for Freud's theories is from an unrepresentative sample. He mostly studied himself, his patients, and only one child (e.g., Little Hans).

The main problem here is that the case studies are based on studying one person in detail, and regarding Freud, the individuals in question are most often middle-aged women from Vienna (i.e., his patients).

This makes generalizations to the wider population (e.g., the whole world) difficult. However, Freud thought this unimportant, believing in only a qualitative difference between people.

Freud may also have shown research bias in his interpretations - he may have only paid attention to information that supported his theories, and ignored information and other explanations that did not fit them.

However, Fisher & Greenberg (1996) argue that Freud's theory should be evaluated in terms of specific hypotheses rather than a whole. They concluded that there is evidence to support Freud's concepts of oral and anal personalities and some aspects of his ideas on depression and paranoia.

They found little evidence of the Oedipal conflict and no support for Freud's views on women's sexuality and how their development differs from men'.

References

Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American psychologist, 54(7), 462.

Breuer, J., & Freud, S. (1895). Studies on hysteria. Standard Edition 2: London.

Fisher, S., & Greenberg, R. P. (1996). Freud scientifically reappraised: Testing the theories and therapy. John Wiley & Sons.

Freud, S. (1894). The neuro-psychoses of defence. SE, 3: 41-61.

Freud, S. (1896). Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses of defence. SE, 3: 157-185.

Freud, S. (1900). The interpretation of dreams. S.E., 4-5.

Freud, S. (1901). The psychopathology of everyday life. SE, 6. London: Hogarth.

Freud, S. (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. Se, 7, 125-243.

Freud, S. (1915). The unconscious. SE, 14: 159-204.

Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 1-64.

Freud, S. (1923). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1-66.

Freud, S. (1925). Negation. Standard edition, 19, 235-239.

Freud, S. (1961). The resistances to psycho-analysis. In T he Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (1923-1925): The Ego and the Id and other works (pp. 211-224).

Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (1995). Implicit social cognition: attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes. Psychological review, 102(1), 4.

Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of experimental psychology, 18(6), 643.

Tulving, E. (1972). Episodic and semantic memory. In E. Tulving & W. Donaldson (Eds.), Organization of Memory, (pp. 381-403). New York: Academic Press.

FAQs

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Sigmund Freud: Theory & Contribution to Psychology

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Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939) was the founding father of psychoanalysis, a method for treating mental illness and a theory explaining human behavior.

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Dr. Glasser Reality Therapy & Choice Theory

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A look into Reality Therapy & Choice Theory.

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3. Give your undivided attention to the speaker. The Chinese symbol that we used to describe listening used the eyes and undivided attention. Absolutely important is dedicating your undivided attention to the speaker if you are to succeed as an active listener. Eye contact is less important. In most listening situations people use eye contact to affirm listening. The speaker maintains eye contact to be sure the listener or listeners are paying attention. From their body language the speaker can tell if he is speaking too softly or loudly, too quickly or slowly, or if the vocabulary or the language is inappropriate. Listeners can also send messages to speakers using body language. Applause is the reason many performers perform. Positive feedback is an endorphin releaser for the giver and the sender. Eye contact can be a form of positive feedback. BUT, eye contact can also be a form of aggression, of trying to show dominance, of forcing submissive behavior. All primates use eye contact to varying degrees. We should be careful how we use it when listening. If we want to provide undivided attention to a child, a better way to show your attention is to do a "walk and talk" as we discussed in Chapter 2. Walk and talk is such a successful strategy that works well for active listening!

4. Use silence effectively. The final rule for active or empathic listening is to effectively use silence. Too often a truly revealing moment is never brought to fruition because of an untimely interruption. Some of the finest police interrogators, counselors, teachers and parents learn more by maintaining silence than by asking questions. As an active or empathic listener, silence is a very valuable tool. DO NOT interrupt unless absolutely necessary. Silence can be painful. It is more painful for a speaker than for a listener. If someone is speaking, and we want them to continue talking, we do not interrupt. Rather, we do provide positive feedback using body language, eye contact, and non word sounds like "umh, huh". Silence is indeed golden especially when used to gather information as a listener.

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Skip to Main Content 3. Give your undivided attention to the speaker. The Chinese symbol that we used to describe listening used the eyes and undivided attention. Absolutely important is dedicating your undivided attention to the speaker if you are to succeed as an active listener. Eye contact is less important.

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Effective teachers, like other effective communicators, recognize the value of understanding their audience. However, for an educator, audience analysis reveals a complexity of differences among students in any given learning environment. Richard Felder says, "The more thoroughly instructors understand the differences, the better chance they have of meeting the diverse learning needs of all of their students" ("Understanding Student Differences," Journal of Engineering Education 94 [2005]: 57).

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Improve Your Counselling Skills in 60 Seconds: Paraphrasing & Summarizing – Narrated by Dr A. Reeves

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If you've ever been in therapy, you have probably noticed that your therapist asks a lot of vague questions. In fact, this has even become a source of humor in pop culture. Bob Newhart's famous question, "How did that make you feel?" has become a standard way to lampoon therapy. Open-ended questions are tools that are not only useful in therapy, they are also good ways to start conversations. Learn the value of these seemingly-vague kinds of questions.

Most therapists are trained to ask open-ended questions. Open-ended questions are ones that allow you to provide whatever amount of detail you want, rather than simply answering "yes" or "no." Open-ended questions encourage you to share relevant material about your life, your way of thinking, and your beliefs.

Consider the following sentences:

1. Do you have a good relationship with your parents?

2. Tell me about your relationship with your parents.

The material covered is identical, but the answers will likely be very different. The first question is a closed-ended question. The expected reply is "yes" or "no." If a therapist asks that question and gets one of those answers, the ball is back in the therapist's court to encourage a fuller response. With a close-ended question, a client may choose to say more, but often they do not.

There is another important difference between these two sentences. Number one is a leading question. It introduces the idea of "good" into the client's consciousness. This is not a particularly troubling example of a leading question, but consider a question like, "Did your father sexually abuse you?" Due to the fact that this question may prompt a certain answer, therapists generally avoid asking ones like that.

One pitfall to avoid is ensuring your open-ended question is actually closed-ended. Sometimes you craft a question that is complicated and seems to you to be open-ended, but in fact, can result in an answer that is basically yes-or-no.

When developing open-ended questions, they are likely to feature the typical "who, what, where, when, why, and how" used in good journalism. But these questions draw out different kinds of responses that can be useful for a therapist.

Questions that focus on "how" often bring out answers that discuss the person's feelings and emotions or the processes they go through. Questions focusing on "what" will lead the person to talk about facts. "When" and "where" will lead to answers about the time, sequence, and place of events. "Who" can elicit insights into relationships. Questions beginning with "why" will bring out reasons. However, you must be careful as asking "why" can seem accusatory and could lead to defensiveness and justification. The proper tone of voice is important for a "why" question to be received as non-judgmental.

Every therapist is different, as are the approaches they may use. However, these are some common questions that therapists may ask at your first appointment. These include:

What brings you here today?

Have you seen a counselor/therapist/psychologist before?

What do you see as being the biggest problem?

How does that problem make you feel?

What makes the problem better?

What positive changes would you like to see happen in your life?

In general, how would you say your mood is?

What sort of things are you expecting from therapy?

What sort of things would it take to make you happier or more at peace?

The principle of asking open-ended questions versus close-ended questions can be used by anyone trying to get a conversation going. For instance, if you are talking with someone you don't know very well, ask them open-ended questions. In fact, if you think of a question with a "yes or no" answer, see if you can change it into a more open-ended version and ask that instead. The conversation will likely move along more easily, and you will get to know that person on a deeper level.

Open-ended questions are not meant to be vague, evasive, or annoying. Rather, they are your therapist's way of getting to know you, like what makes you tick, what you think, what bugs you, what you love, and how she or he can best help you.

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How Open-Ended Questions Can Help Patients in Therapy

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If you've ever been in therapy, you have probably noticed that your therapist asks a lot of vague questions. In fact, this has even become a source of humor in pop culture. Bob Newhart's famous question, "How did that make you feel?" has become a standard way to lampoon therapy.

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Therapist authenticity is viewed as an important therapeutic process. The client's experiencing of the process and significance of therapist genuineness is, however, under-researched. In a case study ( N = 6), the authors analyzed the clients' experiencing of the overall significance of therapist genuineness in their therapy. Both qualitative and quantitative data were gathered and analyzed using the technique of pattern matching. The authors found that clients also experienced processes other than genuineness as crucial therapeutic processes. Nevertheless, the results show that therapist genuineness can be a crucial therapeutic process. The findings imply that whether and how genuineness is crucial for change also depends on the individual client.

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The Significance of Therapist Genuineness From the Client's Perspective

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Therapist authenticity is viewed as an important therapeutic process. The client's experiencing of the process and significance of therapist genuineness is, however, under-researched. In a case study ( N = 6), the authors analyzed the clients' experiencing of the overall significance of therapist genuineness in their therapy.

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Unconditional positive regard is not about liking someone.

Unconditional positive regard (UPR) is the foundation stone of many of the psychotherapies. At first glance it seems like a fairly simple idea. But unpacking what it looks like in practice turns out to be far more difficult.

One of the questions that always crops up is whether it is possible to have UPR for someone who has done terrible hurtful things. "I couldn't like that person", or "I would never approve of what they have done", are frequent comments from people learning about UPR for the first time. But UPR does not mean you must like a person or approve of what they have done.

What it means is that you respect the person as a human being with agency to choose how to respond to their situation and that no matter how dangerous or dysfunctional they seem to be they are doing their best. This rests on the particular philosophical view of human nature associated with the psychologist Carl Rogers, the founder of client-centered therapy.

First, Rogers' theory was that human beings have an innate urge towards socially constructive behavior which is always present and always functioning at some level. Second, Rogers' believed that each person had a need for self-determination; and the more a person's need for self-determination is respected, the more likely their innate urge to be socially constructive will take hold. For Rogers this provided insight into the best way to create nurturing environments at home, school, workplace and the therapy room.

Unconditional positive regard therefore means valuing the person as doing their best to move forward in their lives constructively and respecting the person's right to self-determination no matter what they choose to do.

That doesn't mean that you need to like the person or approve of what they do. Nor does it mean that you have to simply put up with what they do if you see it as dangerous in some way.

Trainee therapists often want to know how to do UPR.

UPR can be misunderstood as being nice to people, smiling at them and nodding. But it's not about what you do. UPR is an attitude. Get the attitude and the behaviour that expresses that attitude will follow.

The thing to understand is that UPR only makes sense as a way to be with others if you think the theory behind it is right. But more than that if you don't buy the theory you won't actually be able to do it no matter how hard you try.

If you are not genuine, your conditional regard will always leak out.

Find out about my new book, Authentic. How to be yourself and why it matters www.authenticityformula.com

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Unconditional positive regard is not about liking someone. Unconditional positive regard (UPR) is the foundation stone of many of the psychotherapies. At first glance it seems like a fairly simple idea. But unpacking what it looks like in practice turns out to be far more difficult.