{"id":13945,"date":"2018-06-20T21:58:37","date_gmt":"2018-06-20T11:58:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.anneskyvington.com.au\/?p=13945"},"modified":"2024-03-09T09:37:21","modified_gmt":"2024-03-08T22:37:21","slug":"depth-versus-cbt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anneskyvington.com.au\/depth-versus-cbt\/","title":{"rendered":"Psychology as a Field of Study"},"content":{"rendered":"
Psychology is a relatively recent area of research and treatment for “inner” emotional problems, with Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) creating his famous brand of psychoanalysis<\/a> in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.\u00a0 William James (1842-1910) is an American philosopher who favoured pragmatic psychology as a way of explaining the mind. Other well-known leaders in the field are Carl Jung, Otto Rank,\u00a0 R.D. Laing, Fritz Perls, Wilhelm Reich,\u00a0 Erich Fromm, Pierre Janet, and Alfred Adler.<\/p>\n Depth forms of therapy<\/strong>, sometimes known as psychodynamic <\/a>therapy, consider past events in a person’s life from a causal perspective. They rely on in-clinic experience, and the close relationship between the analyst and the analysand. Cognitive behavioural therapies<\/strong><\/a> (CBT) rely more on evidence-based research, and involve retraining of clients’ thought processes, emotions and behaviour, without the necessity to recover repressed memories from the past<\/p>\n <\/p>\n My first experience as a recipient of depth psychology in the seventies was, by a lucky chance of fate, with a young woman who called herself a Gestalt therapist. Sarah used an holistic (wholistic) approach to therapy, aiding clients to realise the interdependence of all aspects of their person: the physical, the mental, and the emotional components. The theory arose from the ideas of German psychologists, in particular Kurt Koffka, (1886-1941). He said that “the whole is something else than the sum of its parts.”\u00a0 Note that Aristotle’s “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, although reminiscent of the former statement, does not apply to the study of human personality.<\/p>\n\u00a0Gestalt Therapy<\/strong><\/h4>\n