The frame or therapeutic frame or analytic frame in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are the various environmental factors which make therapy possible, yet are not internal to therapy or to the therapeutic process itself. According to psychoanalytic theory, there are many such factors, such as setting and agreeing to the fee for treatment, agreeing on a definite schedule when to meet, principles associated with anonymity and privacy on the part of the therapist, and other factors. [1] While these factors are not inherently internal to the therapeutic process they (1) set conditions that make sound therapy possible and (2) because of their importance for therapy, often become areas of conflict and exploration within therapy. [2] Consequently, setting a secured frame may be a necessary condition for sound psychoanalytic psychotherapy because it enables therapy patients to be open about their life with the therapist and to feel emotionally secure enough to speak about their deepest emotional conflicts. In some currents of psychoanalysis, the frame is one of the most important elements in psychotherapy and counseling. [3]
While the psychoanalyst Robert Langs did not coin the term, he did make it famous. [4] The "frame" is an image meant to express the set of agreed upon boundaries or ground rules of therapy. [5]
Robert Langs writes, "The therapist's management of the ground rules of psychotherapy constitute his or her most fundamental arena of intervention, and the therapists efforts in this regard will greatly influence all of the other dimensions of the therapeutic interaction and experience". [6] Langs maintains this idea on the grounds that, in general, the emotional disturbances which bring patients to therapy arise from difficulties associated with adaptation. Consequently, an undeveloped, underdeveloped or unarticulated therapeutic frame will tend to produce unconscious anxiety in patients, because it is either unknown or unclear to the patient what the conditions are to which they must adapt in therapy. [7] Further, Langs suggests that the failure to have a clearly developed and articulated therapeutic frame is often the product of unconscious anxiety on the part of the therapist. [8]
Langs also argues that it is only within a secured therapeutic frame that a patient will feel emotionally safe enough to communicate their most painful emotional struggles. [9] Langs even goes so far as to claim that the patient's capacity to symbolize, i.e., be sufficiently contained emotionally so as neither to repress affect nor act affect out (either within or outside of therapy) in part depends on the therapeutic frame being sufficiently secure. Langs argues that there are three distinct "communicative fields" potentially present within the therapeutic environment and that it is only within "secured frame therapy" that the ideal commuicative field, the symbolizing field ("Type A field"), necessary for authentic psychoanalytic work, can actually occur. [10] Thus, success in psychoanalytic psychotherapy is associated with the therapeutic relationship between the client and the therapist, which in turns depends on the therapeutic environment that the therapist establishes, reflecting the genuineness of the therapeutic relationship between the two. [11]
Langs' later work took the concept of the frame somewhat further, in that Langs came to believe that the fundamental basis of deep emotional disturbances is trauma and, especially, death-related trauma and death anxieties. [12] Or, put in Langs' earlier terminology, death and death anxiety are the deepest and most difficult "adaptive context." But, if so, Langs suggests, this causes a therapeutic paradox for psychoanalytic psychotherapy: on the one hand, secured-frame therapy is necessary for sound psychoanalytic therapy and yet secured-frame therapy is also provokes death anxiety in patients, because firm boundaries of any kind tend to provoke anxieties around the firmest and most final of boundaries, death. Thus, the secured frame is necessary for sound, depth-oriented therapy and yet it also evokes the very anxiety that it is meant to cure. [13]
The Swedish psychoanalyst Claes Davidson, who thoroughly studied Langs, has taken the frames of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy even further and concludes that most of today's clients' primary problems are not found in the deep unconscious domain, but in the conscious and/or the preconscious ones. [14] These (pre-)conscious conflicts, as Davidson names them, will manifest themselves in the clients' frame deviations, where they for resolution have to be addressed by the active therapist. [15]
Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques that deal in part with the unconscious mind, and which together form a method of treatment for mental disorders. The discipline was established in the early 1890s by Sigmund Freud, whose work stemmed partly from the clinical work of Josef Breuer and others. Freud developed and refined the theory and practice of psychoanalysis until his death in 1939. In an encyclopedic article, he identified the cornerstones of psychoanalysis as "the assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the recognition of the theory of repression and resistance, the appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus complex." Freud's colleagues Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung developed offshoots of psychoanalysis which they called individual psychology (Adler) and analytical psychology (Jung), although Freud himself wrote a number of criticisms of them and emphatically denied that they were forms of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was later developed in different directions by neo-Freudian thinkers, such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan.
Psychotherapy is the use of psychological methods, particularly when based on regular personal interaction, to help a person change behavior, increase happiness, and overcome problems. Psychotherapy aims to improve an individual's well-being and mental health, to resolve or mitigate troublesome behaviors, beliefs, compulsions, thoughts, or emotions, and to improve relationships and social skills. Numerous types of psychotherapy have been designed either for individual adults, families, or children and adolescents. Certain types of psychotherapy are considered evidence-based for treating some diagnosed mental disorders; other types have been criticized as pseudoscience.
Otto Rank was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, and philosopher. Born in Vienna, he was one of Sigmund Freud's closest colleagues for 20 years, a prolific writer on psychoanalytic themes, editor of the two leading analytic journals of the era, managing director of Freud's publishing house, and a creative theorist and therapist. In 1926, Rank left Vienna for Paris and, for the remainder of his life, led a successful career as a lecturer, writer, and therapist in France and the United States.
Person-centered therapy, also known as person-centered psychotherapy, person-centered counseling, client-centered therapy and Rogerian psychotherapy, is a form of psychotherapy developed by psychologist Carl Rogers and colleagues beginning in the 1940s and extending into the 1980s. Person-centered therapy seeks to facilitate a client's actualizing tendency, "an inbuilt proclivity toward growth and fulfillment", via acceptance, therapist congruence (genuineness), and empathic understanding.
Countertransference, in psychotherapy, refers to a therapist's redirection of feelings towards a patient or becoming emotionally entangled with them. This concept is central to the understanding of therapeutic dynamics in psychotherapy.
Transference is a phenomenon within psychotherapy in which repetitions of old feelings, attitudes, desires, or fantasies that someone displaces are subconsciously projected onto a here-and-now person. Traditionally, it had solely concerned feelings from a primary relationship during childhood.
Relational psychoanalysis is a school of psychoanalysis in the United States that emphasizes the role of real and imagined relationships with others in mental disorder and psychotherapy. 'Relational psychoanalysis is a relatively new and evolving school of psychoanalytic thought considered by its founders to represent a "paradigm shift" in psychoanalysis'.
David Huntingford Malan was a British psychoanalytic psychotherapy practitioner and researcher recognized for his contribution to the development of psychotherapy. He promoted scientific spirit of inquiry, openness, and simplicity within the field. He is also noted for his development of the Malan triangles, which became a rubric in which therapists can reflect upon what they are doing and where they are in relational space at any given moment.
Harold Frederic Searles was one of the pioneers of psychiatric medicine specializing in psychoanalytic treatments of schizophrenia. Searles had the reputation of being a therapeutic virtuoso with difficult and borderline patients; and of being, in the words of Horacio Etchegoyen, president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, "not only a great analyst but also a sagacious observer and a creative and careful theoretician".
In psychoanalysis, resistance is the individual's efforts to prevent repressed drives, feelings or thoughts from being integrated into conscious awareness.
A therapeutic alliance, or working alliance, is a partnership between a patient and their therapist that allows them to achieve goals through agreed-upon tasks.
The therapeutic relationship refers to the relationship between a healthcare professional and a client or patient. It is the means by which a therapist and a client hope to engage with each other and effect beneficial change in the client.
Child psychotherapy, or mental health interventions for children refers to the psychological treatment of various mental disorders diagnosed in children and adolescents. The therapeutic techniques developed for younger age ranges specialize in prioritizing the relationship between the child and the therapist. The goal of maintaining positive therapist-client relationships is typically achieved using therapeutic conversations and can take place with the client alone, or through engagement with family members.
Psychoanalytic dream interpretation is a subdivision of dream interpretation as well as a subdivision of psychoanalysis pioneered by Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century. Psychoanalytic dream interpretation is the process of explaining the meaning of the way the unconscious thoughts and emotions are processed in the mind during sleep.
Common factors theory, a theory guiding some research in clinical psychology and counseling psychology, proposes that different approaches and evidence-based practices in psychotherapy and counseling share common factors that account for much of the effectiveness of a psychological treatment. This is in contrast to the view that the effectiveness of psychotherapy and counseling is best explained by specific or unique factors that are suited to treatment of particular problems.
Supportive psychotherapy is a psychotherapeutic approach that integrates various therapeutic schools such as psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral, as well as interpersonal conceptual models and techniques.
Child psychoanalysis is a sub-field of psychoanalysis which was founded by Anna Freud.
Robert Joseph Langs was a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and psychoanalyst. He was the author, co-author, or editor of more than forty books on psychotherapy and human psychology. Over the course of more than fifty years, Langs developed a revised version of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, currently known as the "adaptive paradigm". This is a distinctive model of the mind, and particularly of the mind's unconscious component, significantly different from other forms of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy.
Reality testing is the psychotherapeutic function by which the objective or real world and one's relationship to it are reflected on and evaluated by the observer. This process of distinguishing the internal world of thoughts and feelings from the external world is a technique commonly used in psychoanalysis and behavior therapy, and was originally devised by Sigmund Freud.
Psychodynamic Therapy with Infants and Parents aims to relieve emotional disturbances within the parent(s), the baby, and/or their interaction, for example, postnatal depression and anxiety, infant distress with breastfeeding and sleep, and attachment disorders. It rests on attachment theory and psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud suggested that a modification of his method could be applied to children, and child analysis was introduced in the 1920s by [Anna Freud].., [Melanie Klein], and Hermine Hug von Hellmuth. Klein speculated on infantile experiences to understand her patients' disorders but she did not practice PTIP. Donald Winnicott, a pediatrician and analyst, focused on the mother-baby interplay in his theorizing and his brief parent-child consultations, but he did not work with PTIP.
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