Autobiographical analysis of the role of social learning in transformative action-and-inquiry
John A. Bilorusky in Cases and Stories of Transformative Action Research, 2021
Circumstances can elicit strong emotional responses. Psychodynamic theory, and other such perspectives, give great attention to the subtle and powerful unconscious and complicated, partly conscious processes that affect how we experience life. For the purposes of this book, I wish mostly to emphasize that for “better” and for “worse,” the content of our social learning is strongly influenced if a situation elicits a memorable emotional response. When I was about 7 years old or so, around 1953, I went with some friends to the Saturday afternoon matinee at the neighborhood movie theater. We would usually see cartoons and perhaps a black and white western movie. On one occasion, while watching one of these “cowboy and Indian” westerns, the cowboys captured the leader of the Indians, two of them restrained him by holding his arms down on each side of his body, then the third cowboy walked up to him, and yanked the “Indian’s” necklace off his neck.
Anxiety and psychodynamic principles
Devinder Rana, Dominic Upton in Psychology for Nurses, 2013
The psychodynamic approach explores how the mind (human psyche), especially the unconscious part of the human mind is responsible for everyday behaviour. This is reflected in Morris and Maisto's (2002, p. 445) definition of psychodynamic theory as: Seeing behaviour as the product of psychological forces that interact within the individual, often outside conscious awareness. The interplay of unconscious mental processes, determine human feelings, thoughts and behaviour.Psychoanalysis, or psychotherapy, is the therapy that arises out of the psychodynamic approach which counsellors may use in practice. The aim of the therapy is to help the client gain a deeper insight into their behaviour. This is facilitated by recognising, exploring and understanding unconscious emotions and thoughts, which are believed to cause the surface problems. Nurses themselves cannot practise psychoanalysis or psychotherapy unless they are trained as a counsellor. However, the principles within this approach are useful for a nurse who may have to communicate with or confront a patient where the cause of the problem is not obvious, which will warrant some kind of exploration by the nurse.
What seems to be the trouble? Why healthcare is complicated, and will get worse
Derek Steinberg in Complexity in Healthcare and the Language of Consultation, 2018
Sigmund Freud founded what he called psychoanalysis during the nineteenth century, and the subject was taken further by those who broadly agreed with him, despite argument and schism (for example CG Jung, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Alfred Adler, and many others) and the wider field is generally identified as psychodynamic theory or depth psychology. Psychodynamic theory postulates that our wishes, attitudes, feelings and behaviour are powerfully influenced by psychological processes of which we are unaware – hence the Unconscious. We can become aware of unconscious influences and pressures to a helpful extent (i.e. achieving insight), but the depths of the unconscious can never be fully plumbed. Moreover, they supposedly go ‘down’ (because the model is in a sense layered, like geology – hence ‘depth psychology’) beyond what may be described in primarily psychological terms, to very primitive feelings and impulses which are as much animal as human, and particularly to do with life, death, love, aggression and sex. More than is sometimes realised, Freudian psychodynamic thinking is both biological and evolutionary in its account of the origin of such feelings. It is also a developmental model; that is to say, one that is understood as gradually taking shape as part of growth and maturation.
Becoming a self through occupation: Occupation as a source of self-continuity in identity formation
Published in Journal of Occupational Science, 2021
My theoretical lens in this paper is comprised primarily of theories rooted in psychodynamic theory, developmental/personality psychology, and narrative theory. Psychodynamic theory and personality psychology have received scarce attention in occupational science literature, which may be attributed to the ongoing debate about its applicability to non-western cultures. Nevertheless, these theories allowed for an exploration of the relationship between occupation and identity beyond the experimental level. As a consequence of my choice of theoretical lens, I have not expounded upon the impact of culture and how discourses and shared beliefs scaffold or restrain identity formation. Nevertheless, it is, of course, essential to recognize that each culture or sub-culture has its own unique repertoire of available occupational forms or categories, which can be engaged and inhabited in personal ways (Nelson, 1988).
Appreciating the Role of the Unconscious in Situations of Patient Ambivalence
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2022
Michael James Redinger, Razvan Popescu
However, we also believe their efforts neglect a major facet of human psychology that also contributes to situations of patient ambivalence. Every category within the target article’s taxonomy are situations in which the primary drivers of observed ambivalence are at the conscious level. As a result, the analysis neglects unconscious drivers of patient uncertainty. Psychodynamic theory classically frames unconscious drives as significant contributors to human behavior and unconscious conflicts as major contributors to the development of psychopathology (Gabbard 2014). Crucially, patients do not enter the medical setting mentally divorced from their lived experiences and previous ways of coping with psychological stress. Instead, our experience is that unconscious conflict which manifests in psychosocial dysfunction outside of the hospital is frequently recapitulated in patient interactions with the medical staff within the hospital. As a result, a basic understanding of psychodynamic theory will benefit clinical ethicists and other medical professionals by enabling them to recognize and appreciate the role of the unconscious, especially when patients are unable to articulate the reason for their ambivalence or to add nuance to how unconscious factors may contribute to it. This is the case even when patients would otherwise fall into one of the categories of conscious ambivalence described in the taxonomy.
Putting the Social Work Academy on the Couch: Exploring Emotional Resistance to Psychoanalytic Education
Published in Smith College Studies in Social Work, 2019
Of course the resistance to psychoanalysis in much of contemporary academia is not universal and many places value its theories. For example, there have been some important recent articles that articulate the relevance of psychodynamic theory for social work (Cummins, 2017; Mishna, Van Wert, & Asakura, 2013). Esteemed journals such as the Clinical Social Work Journal, Smith College Studies in Social Work, the Journal of Social Work Practice, and Psychoanalytic Social Work frequently present articles that are psychodynamically oriented. There are also many faculty who support a psychodynamic approach. Psychodynamic concepts often find their way into the curriculum indirectly – some faculties offer elective courses in this area – and sometimes concepts enter the curriculum under different names without acknowledging their origins (Brandell, 2013). Social workers who have been trained in psychodynamic approaches frequently emphasize the personal and professional usefulness of these concepts (Bettmann, 2006; Cummins, 2017), and the NASW standards (2005) specifically identify psychodynamic theory as a core component of the clinical social work theoretical knowledge base (Thyer, 2017). Social workers are increasingly pursuing analytic training (Brandell, 2013). Approximately 17% of current candidates at the American Psychoanalytic Association affiliated institutes are social workers (Katz, Kaplan, & Stromberg, 2012).
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