Glossary of Psychological Terms
As a general aid, Cox Associates have assembled a couple of pages of psychological terms which you may find useful. It is by no means complete, and if you require professional assistance, you shouldn't base any diagnosis upon a glossary: you should contact us instead.
Our Glossary is divided into the following sections:
General terms
Amnesia: Inability to remember. Sometimes induced as a hypnotic technique that arranges for the subject to forget some or all aspects of a session or some other information.
Analgesia: hypnotic technique whereby pain is eliminated or reduced.
Anesthesia: eliminating sensations through hypnosis.
Attributional style: the thinking style that a patient predominantly uses, ascribing causes and qualities to event and persons and often construing their experience to confirm their own negative expectations.
Catalepsy: rigidity of the limbs or the body induced by trance.
Confusion technique: using great detail, non sequiturs, or ambiguous communications to overwhelm the conscious, logical aspects of the person in order to facilitates trance induction or to bypass conscious limitations.
Dissociation: the process whereby some ideas, feelings, or activities lose relationship to other aspects of consciousness and personality and operate automatically or independently. Can also refer to helping a patient dissociate unpleasant feeling from traumatic memories.
Empathy: the process of becoming acutely aware of the internal experience of another person and conveying this awareness to them.
Flooding: this is a form of exposure to the worst feared situation for a prolonged period of time, continuing until anxiety reduces. This may take place in reality or in imagination. It is not reliably affective.
Illusion of alternatives: giving the patient two or more alternatives, any of which, if chosen, would lead in the desired direction or have the desired result.
Indirect suggestion: any communication technique used to deliver suggestions in an oblique manner. Includes presupposition, interspersal and parallel communication.
Imbedded suggestibility: devised by Milton Erickson to deliver messages indirectly to patients. The technique involves embedding messages with different nonverbal (such as voice ton shifts, volume shifts, etc.) or verbal aspects (eg. saying something very clear and straightforward in the midst of a lot of ambiguous and confusing talk) in the communication to the patient.
Metaphor: a figure a speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another by way of suggesting a likeness or analogy between them. The Greek route for the word means to "carry over" or "to transfer". So, one idea or object is linked to another via the implication or suggestion that the two are related or connected in some way.
A common understanding for a metaphor is that it is storytelling, but the key word above is "suggestion". That is to say that a story by itself is just a story, which may or may not be entertaining. For the story to be therapeutic or educational in some way, the teller must imply indirectly or directly that there is something of significance in it. This implication will trigger an inner search for unique significance. For many people the mere telling of a story is sufficient to start an inner search because of the general cultural expectancy that stories have a point or meaning to them.
Miracle question: a central intervention in solution focused therapy which invites the client to describe in detail their vision of life without their particular problem.
"My friend john" technique: Inducing a trance by telling about previous induction that was done to a different client whose name was "John". By including the exact word and intonations while recounting the previous induction, an induction can be done without the subject's awareness.
Naturalistic approach: using what natural conditions exists within or around the person to induce trance or accomplish therapy. This approach involves assuming that the patient or subject has everything he needs in order to go into a trance and/or to accomplish therapeutic goals. The approach also involves using a casual, nonritualized approach to therapy and induction.
Paradoxical intention: a variety of interventions, including humour, designed to be surprising and contrary to client expectations. Often used with entrenched behaviour in which the client effort to solve the problem make it worse. Prescription of a symptom is an example.
Parallel communication: talking about one thing or area to communicate indirectly about another situation. Includes anecdotes, analogies, jokes, riddles and other metaphorical devices.
Perception: the experience of meanings — pattern matching.
Post-hypnotic suggestion: a hypnotic technique for directing the subject to perform certain actions or have a certain experience at some time after the trance.
Presuppositions: a form of language in which certain ideas or experiences are presumed without ever being directly stated.
Psychopathology: originally a psychiatric term referring to a mental sickness or to an underlying problem, often classified into disorders such as depression, agoraphobia, post-traumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder, etc. Many counsellors dispute the reality behind, or helpfulness of, such labelling.
Reframing: a universal therapeutic technique vital in brief therapy. It means enriching the pattern through which we perceive what is happening.
Symptom substitution: giving the patient a new symptom to substitute for the old one, either as a step to resolving the symptom or provide a symptom that is not so disruptive and painful to the patient.
Symptom transformation: taking the underlying energy or thinking involved in a symptom and transferring it to another object or direction.
Thinking errors: also known as "cognitive distortions", are logical errors based on faulty information processing. These include jumping to conclusions, personalization and all-or-nothing thinking.
Utilisation: the acceptance of all the behaviours, symptoms, attitudes and emotional responses of the client, no matter how negative or obstructive they may appear, as assets and resources in the therapy process.