The Work of Psychology

1. The goal of psychoanalysis is to help people learn about their unconscious disorders and help them recover. Analysts draw on techniques such as free association and the interpretation of dreams, resistances, and the transference to the therapist of long-repressed feelings. Psychoanalysis is criticized because its interpretations are hard to prove or disprove and because it is time-consuming and costly.
2. Humanistic therapists focus on a client's current conscious feelings. They also help the client take responsibility for their problems. Gestalt therapy aims to make people whole by breaking through their defenses and helping them to sense and express their feelings.
3. Behavior therapists apply well-established learning principles to eliminate the unwanted behavior. They try to replace unwanted thoughts and behaviors with more constructive ways of thinking and acting. In systematic desensitization, a pleasant, relaxed state is associated with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli. This procedure is commonly used to treat phobias. In aversive conditioning, an unpleasant state is associated with an unwanted behavior.
4. Behavior therapists apply operant conditioning principles by reinforcing desired behaviors while withholding reinforcement for undesired behaviors. In institutional settings, therapists may create a token economy in which a patient receives a token for exhibiting a desired behavior. Critics worry that the patient will stop exhibiting the desired behavior if there are no tokens involved. They also worry that this is too much control on the patient's behavior.
5. Cognitive therapists assume that our thinking is associated with our feelings, so they try to teach people who suffer psychological disorders c...

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... Electroconvulsive therapy is a biomedical therapy for severely depressed patients in which a brief electric current is sent through the brain of a patient. Psychosurgery removes or destroys brain tissue in an effort to change behavior. A form of psychosurgery is a lobotomy, and it is a procedure in which the nerves that connect the frontal lobes to the emotion-controlling centers of the inner brain are cut. I is now very rare to perform one because it turns the patient into a vegetable.
11. Preventive mental health experts view many psychological disorders as an understandable response to a disturbed and stressful society. It is not only the person who needs treatment but also the person's social context. The aim of preventive mental health programs is to change these unhelpful environments into more nurturing environments that encourage growth and self-confidence.