PSYCHOTHERAPY LONDON

Psychotherapy or personal counseling with a psychotherapist, is an intentional interpersonal relationship used by trained psychotherapists to aid a client or patient in problems of living.
It aims to increase the individual's sense of their own well-being. Psychotherapists employ a range of techniques based on experiential relationship building, dialogue, communication and behavior change and that are designed to improve the mental health of a client or patient, or to improve group relationships (such as in a family).
Psychotherapy may also be performed by practitioners with a number of different qualifications, including psychiatry, clinical psychology, counseling psychology, mental health counseling, clinical social work, marriage and family therapy, rehabilitation counseling, music therapy, occupational therapy, psychiatric nursing, psychoanalysis and others. Indeed, psychotherapy can be a profession in its own right, and in the United Kingdom it is voluntarily regulated by the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy.

What does psychotherapy mean?

The word psychotherapy comes from the Ancient Greek words psych?, meaning breath, spirit, or soul and therapeia or therapeuein, to nurse or cure. Its use was first noted around 1890. It is defined as the relief of distress or disability in one person by another, using an approach based on a particular theory or paradigm, and that the agent performing the therapy has had some form of training in delivering this. It is these latter two points which distinguish psychotherapy from other forms of counseling or caregiving.

Most forms of psychotherapy use spoken conversation. Some also use various other forms of communication such as the written word, artwork, drama, narrative story or music. Psychotherapy with children and their parents will often involve play, use of dramatization (i.e. role-play), and drawing, with a co-constructed narrative from these non-verbal and displaced modes of interacting. Psychotherapy occurs within a structured encounter between a trained therapist and client(s). Purposeful, theoretically based psychotherapy began in the 19th century with psychoanalysis; since then, scores of other approaches have been developed and continue to be created.
Therapy is generally employed in response to a variety of specific or non-specific manifestations of clinically diagnosable and/or existential crises. Treatment of everyday problems is more often referred to as counseling (a distinction originally adopted by Carl Rogers). However, the term counseling is sometimes used interchangeably with "psychotherapy".
Whilst some psychotherapeutic interventions are designed to treat the patient employing the medical model, many psychotherapeutic approaches do not adhere to the symptom-based model of "illness/cure". Some practitioners, such as humanistic therapists, see themselves more in a facilitative/helper role. As sensitive and deeply personal topics are often discussed during psychotherapy, therapists are expected, and usually legally bound, to respect client or patient confidentiality. The critical importance of confidentiality is enshrined in the regulatory psychotherapeutic organizations' codes of ethical practice.

Psychotherapy Systems

• Psychoanalytic - it was the first practice to be called a psychotherapy. It encourages the verbalization of all the patient's thoughts, including free associations, fantasies, and dreams, from which the analyst formulates the nature of the unconscious conflicts which are causing the patient's symptoms and character problems.

• Cognitive behavioral - generally seeks by different methods to identify and transcend maladaptive cognition, appraisal, beliefs and reactions with the aim of influencing destructive negative emotions and problematic dysfunctional behaviors.

• Psychodynamic - is a form of depth psychology, the primary focus of which is to reveal the unconscious content of a client's psyche in an effort to alleviate psychic tension. Although its roots are in psychoanalysis, psychodynamic therapy tends to be briefer and less intensive than traditional psychoanalysis.

• Existential - is based on the existential belief that human beings are alone in the world. This isolation leads to feelings of meaninglessness, which can be overcome only by creating one's own values and meanings.

• Humanistic - emerged in reaction to both behaviorism and psychoanalysis and is therefore known as the Third Force in the development of psychology. It is explicitly concerned with the human context of the development of the individual with an emphasis on subjective meaning, a rejection of determinism, and a concern for positive growth rather than pathology. It posits an inherent human capacity to maximize potential, 'the self-actualizing tendency'. The task of Humanistic therapy is to create a relational environment where this tendency might flourish.

• Brief - "Brief therapy" is an umbrella term for a variety of approaches to psychotherapy. It differs from other schools of therapy in that it emphasizes (1) a focus on a specific problem and (2) direct intervention. It is solution-based rather than problem-oriented. It is less concerned with how a problem arose than with the current factors sustaining it and preventing change.

• Systemic - seeks to address people not at an individual level, as is often the focus of other forms of therapy, but as people in relationship, dealing with the interactions of groups, their patterns and dynamics (includes family therapy & marriage counseling).

• Transpersonal - Addresses the client in the context of a spiritual understanding of consciousness.

Psychoanalysis

Freud , seated left of picture with Jung seated at right of picture. 1909
Psychoanalysis was developed in the late 1800s by Sigmund Freud. His therapy explores the dynamic workings of a mind understood to consist of three parts: the hedonistic id (German: das Es, "the it"), the rational ego (das Ich, "the I"), and the moral superego (das Überich, "the above-I"). Because the majority of these dynamics are said to occur outside people's awareness, Freudian psychoanalysis seeks to probe the unconscious by way of various techniques, including dream interpretation and free association. Freud maintained that the condition of the unconscious mind is profoundly influenced by childhood experiences. So, in addition to dealing with the defense mechanisms employed by an overburdened ego, his therapy addresses fixations and other issues by probing deeply into clients' youth.
Other psychodynamic theories and techniques have been developed and used by psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, personal growth facilitators, occupational therapists and social workers. Techniques for group therapy have also been developed. While behaviour is often a target of the work, many approaches value working with feelings and thoughts. This is especially true of the psychodynamic schools of psychotherapy, which today include Jungian therapy and Psychodrama as well as the psychoanalytic schools. Other approaches focus on the link between the mind and body and try to access deeper levels of the psyche through manipulation of the physical body which gave rise to various body movement based psychotherapeutic approaches such as neo-Reichian Alexander Lowen's Bioenergetic analysis, Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing, Jack Rosenberg's integrative body psychotherapy, Pat Ogden's sensorimotor psychotherapy etc. They are not to be confused with alternative medicine body-work which seeks primarily to improve physical health because despite the fact that bodywork techniques (for example Alexander Technique, Rolfing, and the Feldenkrais Method) affect the emotions, they are not overtly designed to work on psychological issues.