Approaches
PERSON - CENTERED APPROACH
The quest for authenticity. With Carl Rogers being the leader of the person centered approach, he highlighted the human values of growth and potential, a theory which was in resonance with the present values that were dominating: sex roles were becoming more egalitarian, U.S policies regarding racial segregation were being dismissed.
Hence Carl Rogers believed that the aim of psychotherapy is to help the person become the self that one truly is. In other words, to successfuly deny conformity and to obtain an authentic form of being, which will be chosen by him/her with responsibility. "Be the self that one truly is" like Nietzsche stated, however Rogers named this proccess with one word "self-actualisation".
In addition, person centered therapy, includes 6 conditions that if applied sufficiently, it will assist in enabling the patient's natural tendency for self-actualisation:
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Therapist-patient to be in psychological contact to provide positive emotions, with the aim to demonstrate that accepting such emotions means no harm, it wont neccessary end badly and that is more than pleasant to have someone accompany you in life's challenges.
- The one, who is called the patient, to be in a state of incongruence between his/her inner experience and his/her outer conscioussness. Through the psychotherapeutic proccess, the patient will examine the various aspects of his/her experience as it naturally occurs, by utilising the bodily sensations as much as noticing the emotions that come with it.
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The therapist to resonate an unconditional positive regard towards the patient, which in time it will transform in awe for his/her personal world.
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For the therapist to be congruent. In other words his/her stance and consciousness to be in resonance with his/her inner experience and feelings. When that takes place, the therapist is whole and cohesive in the therapeutic moment.
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The therapist to communicate empathy towards the patient. As Martin Buber has stated: "confirming the other ... confirming means accepting the total potential of the other, that I can recognize the other, to try understand how the person was in the past and how this influenced what he has become".
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The communication to the client of the therapist’s empathic understanding and unconditional positive regard is to a minimal degree achieved
EXISTENTIAL APPROACH
Although existential approach integrates elements from both psychoanalytic and humanistic approaches, its base is structered on the writings of existential philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl Kierkegard, Nietzche, Sartre and others. Menard Boss and Ludwig Biswanger were among the first psychoanalysts who added existential elements to the psychoanalytic proccess. However, the pionneers who establish existentialism as a psychotherapeutic approach were Viktor Frankl and Rollo May. Death, finitude, freedom, loneliness, responsibility and loss are some of the issues that the approach aims to explore and understand in order to bring some relief to the possible degree, without naively denying the reality and the challenges that each era brings along. In addition, existential psychotherapy, like the other approaches, attempts to cure postmodern mental states such as increased anixety, apathy, alienation, guilt and biterness.
Rollo May believed that psychological problems, work similarly to illness symptoms like fever: it is an indication that there is something wrong in the organism's structure and it struggles to survive. Thus May proposed that the aim of psychotherapy is to free humans. Free them as much as possible from psychological and psychosomatic symptoms that troubles the person's life. Free from compulsions such as workaholism, self-defeat attitudes or even the continuous choosing of erotic companions that bring along pain and hurt. Consequently, existential psychotherapy does not have a specific consensus or methodology which has to follow for it's procedure. The therapist tries to understand the patient, as a unique and special being with the assistance of an equal and honest relationship. Driven by phenomenology, special care is attended in the patients inner world, respecting the subjectivity that it essentially contains.
ANALYTIC APPROACH
Looking Freud’s theories inside the economical and hence the political context of his era, Zaretsky (2015) comes forth to point out that this context, might have influenced Freud in creating a reactive temperament, when started forming his theories. Freud began contemplating whether there is an inherited schema in humans, which stresses gender difference and reproduction. However he soon based his theory, not in gender difference but in the relationship between libido and repression, mechanisms which are developed in childhood and later on remain in the unconscious. Therefore Freud recognized that every person has his/her own way of exercising his capacity to love, in the impulses he/she gratifies by it. In other words, in an era which the norm was sameness, Freud, gave voice to individuality.
A revolutionary voice, in an era where sexuality was still grounded to the gender based Victorian theories.
Later psychoanalytic theories however, like those of Donald Winnicott, John Bowlby and Heinz Kohut followed a different road from Freuds, highlighting that human behaviour is influenced by the interpersonal relationships rather than the instinct impulses like Freud believed. Hence the interpersonal relationships formed in the early life, mostly with the first caregivers, is the central issue that is attended by the therapeutic dyad. In this form of psychoanalysis the interpretations by the therapist continue to be part of the process, however the therapeutic relationship also plays a vital role. Kohut believed that the therapist's aim is to provide to the patient a "corrective emotional experience" through an empathetic and honest understanding.