People- namely, me- sometimes bandy about psychotherapeutic terms like ‘ego’, ‘neurotic’ and ‘projection’. We know that these terms can come in handy sometimes, for descriptive purposes (“I have an ego the size of a planet and I’m still a neurotic mess”) but I do get curious about their origins. I know that a lot of them come from the mysterious practice of psychoanalysis- but what the heck is that? I’m more familiar with cognitive-behaviour therapy, which doesn’t seem to go in for those terms. All of this got me wondering about terminology and therapy.
So first off, it appears that the general term for all of these sorts of therapy is ‘psychotherapy’- so there is a field of psychotherapy, just like there is a field of physiotherapy. And, there are a number of different types of psychotherapy, with each type having subtypes, all of which are supported by various psychological theories.
As this site notes, psychonalysis is a particular type of psychotherapy. To be confusing, according to the site there’s also a watered down version of psychoanalysis called psychoanalytic psychotherapy, or psychodynamic psychotherapy. Based on the description of psychoanalysis given by that last site, it doesn’t sound too appealing to me. I wouldn’t like the part where I was supposed to talk and talk and talk and the therapist would just occassionaly say mmhm and I see and go on, and that’s it. I’m sure this reveals something about me that a psychoanalyst would like to interpret.
At the same time,
psychoanalysis is where we get some of those fascinating words like ego
and
transference,
which is also refered to as projection. According to
this
site there are more types of tranference and countertransference
than you can shake a stick at.
posted at 14:05 on Mon, 15 Aug, 2005 |
path: /living
All material copyrighted by Jen Schellinck. All rights reserved.