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:
Types of therapy and the beliefs behind them
Behaviour therapy: a mode of treatment that focuses on modifying observable behaviour and thoughts that relate to behaviour.
Brief therapy: therapy with various forms but characterised by the planned use of specific concepts and principles employed in a solution focussed, purposeful way. Any form of therapy that is as brief as possible whist being efficacious.
Client-centred therapy: Carl Rogers' original model of counselling derived in the 1940s. It placed emphasis on the client's autonomy, innate trustworthiness, tendency towards self-actualisation and the role of the counsellor as providing the climate in which therapy would naturally occur. The term "client-centred" replaced "non-directive" and client-centred therapy is now often referred to as person-centred counselling. Its principle therapeutic tool is active listening.
Cognitive therapy: the model of therapy originated by Ellis (1962) and Beck (1967) which identifies cognition (thinking) as the most significant factor in psychological disturbance and its treatment. Originally used to treat depression, cognitive therapy seeks to identify specific instances and general patterns of faulty thinking. A centre concept is that thinking is major part of experience and that automatic thoughts need to be analysed into their habitual, non-empirical, and modifiable components. Clients learn to re-examine such thoughts and to test their effects against empirical evidence in behavioural assignments in everyday life.
Cognitive-analytical therapy (CAT): a confused fusion of cognitive therapy and psychoanalytical ideas.
Cognitive-behavioural therapy: relies on a variety of empirically-based techniques to achieve mutually determined goals. It strives for self-efficacy and relief of current problems through challenging faulty thinking and their behavioural correlates, often employing social-learning skills.
Cognitive restructuring therapy: an approach aimed at helping people, particularly those suffering from anxiety disorders and depression, by correcting habitual errors in thinking - changing negative thinking into positive thinking.
Gestalt therapy/counselling: a distinctive method of counselling and therapy initiated by Fritz Perls, which emphasises immediacy, experiencing and personal responsibility. Perls developed gestalt therapy from psychoanalysis and used psychodramatic techniques to focus fully on the client's behaviour (verbal, non-verbal, emotional, intellectual and physical) within the session. Gestalt aims at heightened awareness of behaviour and facilitating conscious choices and responsive living. Clients may be asked to perform chairwork, an exercise which heightens awareness of incomplete experiences and often produces cathartic release. Clients are often encouraged to engage in dialogues between one part of themselves and another, the aim being to clarify incomplete understanding and to enable integration. The gestalt stress on responsibility means that clients may be asked to consider how they give themselves headaches, for example, or other psychosomatic escapes from responsibility.
Hypnoanalytical approaches: these approaches assume that the presenting problem is being dynamically maintained by repressed historical experiences or current conflicts. Followers of this school believe that in order to solve problems the client needs to access the repressed experiences using hypnosis in order to gain insight and to "work through" the associated feelings in order to re-evaluate the conflictual material in the context of the present time. It has a dangerous tendency to produce false memories.
Interpersonal therapy: explicitly regards problems, especially depression, as being maintained by problematic relationships. It teaches relationship skills and is one of the better therapies.
Long-term therapy: recapitulating one's history with a (presumably) stable figure.
Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP): brief, solution-focused therapy mainly derived from studying the work of Milton H. Erickson and developed by John Grinder and Richard Bandler. Very technique orientated, but not grounded in a scientific understanding of the mind/body system. Promotes many questionable assumptions, such as that any skill can be "modelled" and rapidly learnt by anybody. Pioneered the early version of the rewind technique and also stress the importance of the effects of norminalisations on people in therapy. However, has become very culty in the way that it is promoted.
Person-centred therapy: see client-centred therapy above.
Psychoanalytical counselling: is based on psychoanalytical principles. Pschoanalysis is the discipline, founded by Freud, of investigating the unconscious processes and providing therapeutic interpretations for those (analysands) receiving analysis in its clinical form. Pschoanalytically orientated psychotherapy is the description given to a less intense form of analysis, with sessions held two or three times a week, as opposed to four of five, in which the patient may be seated facing the therapist rather than behind them or on a couch. Theories derived from psychoanalysis include: individual psychology, transactional analysis and micropsychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is often criticised for being protracted, elitist, ineffective and creating dependency.
Psychodynamic counselling: any counselling which makes use of dynamic theories and practices. "Psychodynamic" refers to the inner, unconscious drives and conflicts of the mind and term usually echoes the psychoanalytic traditions. Psychodynamic technique and theory may draw exclusively on Freud, Klein or Jung, or demonstrate its own eclecticism, learning from all three schools as well as neo-Freudians, post-Freudians and others. It employs the concepts of the unconscious, defences and resistance, transference and counter-transference, free association and interpretation among others. Psychodynamic counsellors are alert to client references to significant figures in their past and ways in which these may be linked with the client-counsellor relationship.
Solution-focused brief therapy: a particular economical derivative of systemic therapy. It emphasises the therapeutic use of questions, building on expectations to problems, and rapid transitions to solutions intrinsic to a problem or client.
Strategic therapy: generally refers to specific therapist-initiated interventions designed for specific problems. Sees problems as often maintained by efforts to change them. Symptoms are often treated as having a function. Change is effected primarily through treating a specific symptom. Implicitly systemic and interpersonal.
Structural therapy: seeks to create a change in immediate problems through altering transactional processes in a family system. (Transactional analysis)
Systematic therapy: therapy that treats problems via a relationship or interaction. Systems theory relies on the ideas that the whole is larger than the sum of parts, that the system tends to resist change (homeostasis), and that changing one part of a system will affect other parts. All therapy should properly be considered systemic.
Rogerian: referring to the theory and practices of counselling and psychotherapy of Carl Rogers. "Rogerian" is a term inappropriately but quite commonly applied to person-centred counselling and particularly to the non-directive nature of much counselling. It is in some way paradoxical to speak of the "enormous influence" of Rogers since he believed strongly in the individual's internal locus of evaluation and unique experiencing, and would not have encourages an attitude of unthinking acceptance and compliance in relation to his views. In fact, he viewed the adjective "Rogerian" with deep distaste.