[music] [music] When someone suffering from a psychological ailment interacts with a therapist with the goal of relieving that ailment, therapy happens. It comes in all shapes and sizes. There are currently over 400 different systems of psychotherapy. But one family of practices, the psychodynamic approach, has its roots in the Freudian tradition of psychoanalysis, which encouraged people to explore their childhood memories, and by doing so, develop insight into their psychological difficulties.

Psychodynamic is a broad term. And it includes things like psychoanalysis, and a whole variety of different offshoots that have developed over the last century.

The hallmarks of psychoanalysis are several techniques used by the analyst to help their client develop insight into their problems. These included free association, [clank] [plate shattering] dream analysis, interpretations of thoughts and actions, [water rushing] [typing sounds] and analysis of resistance to psychological treatment. [door slams]

What happens in therapy— the reason why psychodynamic therapy can help them is because the therapist, in a sense, is exploring the architecture of that a unconscious. And they're trying to figure out what sorts of things have happened during the person's development, what's stored in networks of implicit memory that are resulting in symptomatology. So your unconscious in a sense rests in our evolutionary history, our developmental history as individuals, and also in our traumatic history because a lot of trauma is stored in networks of memory that are unconscious. And some of Freud's techniques were free association, for example. He would ask someone to say a word— you say, and what does that remind of? And he would just have them continue. And it's not linear. It's not rational. It's associative. It's more like a network or a spider web of associations, as opposed to a linear track based on language.

Freud felt that dreams had specific or particular meetings for people.

There are several distinctive features of Freud's version of therapy.

Well, probably the most distinctive thing— two things— would be that the client's lying down on some kind of a couch, and the second distinctive things that Freud would sit behind his clients.

Psychodynamic therapies now include a range of therapy techniques that have grown from the core concepts of Freud system but have gradually been refined and realigned. For example, therapists are less likely to interpret a client's statement as a sign of unconscious sexual or aggressive impulses.

And what does this mean to you?

I don't know.

I get the sort of feeling that you're the type of person who needs to keep active. If you don't keep active something goes wrong. Is this true?

Yes. You see, you've established a pattern, haven't you?

Around the middle of the 20th century, there was a gathering sentiment among therapists that the psychodynamic approach, at times, holds an overly negative view of the human condition. Humanistic therapies came to be based on the idea that human nature is generally positive, and that each of us has a deep desire to strive for personal improvement. Humanistic therapy strives to be congruent, empathetic, and unconditionally positive.

Humanistic therapy has a different starting point. We're not thinking about the evolutionary, Darwinian past in the deep history of the brain. We're really thinking in terms of human experience, the phenomenological experience of the client.

So this guy that you went to town with really said you're no good? Is that what you're telling me?

In humanistic therapies, the therapist and client usually sit facing one another, and the therapist strives to have the same message conveyed by her words, facial expression, and body language.

And what does he think of you? He thinks you're no good. And that really knocked you for a loop. You can tell yourself you don't care. But some part of you does care because some part of you is upset by it.

People need to have meaning in their lives, or their lives have to have a meeting. And so this whole search for meaning, I think, is key with humanistic therapy. [music]