Counseling

This essay will outline the key points of psychodynamic and person centred approaches to counselling. It will show ways of how the approaches understand the person and also what the psychological distress is experienced by the individuals. I will also reflect on which model appeals most to me after comparing and contrasting the two models.
Person Centred and Psychodynamic counsellors have a lot to offer clients, however the differences between the approaches when they are examined, there are significant areas of contradiction and incompatibility’.
Wheeler and McLeod (1995) briefly compare the key principles of Person Centred and Psychodynamic approaches and critically evaluate where these approaches part company with one another.
Person centred and psychodynamic counsellors, both have one main aim to help people develop in a positive way and to move forwards , however the methods they use to reach this goal varies

Psychodynamic psychotherapy is formed from psychoanalysis and is based around a number of concepts based on the Freudian theory which bases the idea that these traumatic experiences are actively repressed and therefore clients are likely to repeat behaviours. The key concepts are psychosexual stages that occur in the childhood stages of development, eg, Id, ego and super ego and defences mechanisms.
Freud believed all of these unconscious thought processes lead to a person’s present behaviour. Feud also based his theory that human behaviour and relationships are shaped by the conscious and the unconscious. What Freud meant by ‘sexual’   in his own native German language he used the concept that might be more accurately be translated as ‘life force’ or ‘emotional energy’(Bettelheim 1983). Joseph Breuer and of course Sigmund Freud were the two pioneers of psychodynamic treatment. Breuer favoured the hypnosis and where Freud did not agree with this he insisted and relied on the method of talk theory more known as free association.

Freud demanded...