Psychodynamic Vs Cognitive Therapy

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Cognitive therapy deals with the interaction of thoughts and feelings. The main goal of cognitive therapists is to help clients identify destructive thinking and change it into something more positive and constructive.
Cognitive therapy was founded by Dr. Aaron Beck in the 1960’s. Beck discovered that depressed patients’ negative thoughts tend to occur spontaneously and irrationally. Through experimentation, Beck developed new methods for patients to identify and change their negative thoughts into something more realistic. Since then, cognitive therapy has grown and expanded (Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy).
The main technique that cognitive therapists use for helping patients is gentle questioning over the thought processes …show more content…

Unlike behavioral therapy, cognitive therapy focuses on the mind and not the actions of the patient, but like behavioral therapy, cognitive therapy attempts to help them get rid of unwanted behaviors. Dr. Beck was originally a psychoanalyst, so the fact that both cognitive and psychodynamic therapy attempt to expose something in the mind through looking at past events is understandable. However, cognitive therapy focuses on thoughts, while psychoanalysis looks at feelings. Both cognitive and humanistic therapies focus on conscious thoughts and promote a positive self-image, but cognitive therapists expose destructive thought processes, while humanistic therapists act as a nonjudgmental sounding board for their clients’ thoughts and feelings (Meyer, …show more content…

Cognitive-behavioral therapy combines cognitive and behavioral therapies—in addition to helping improve a patient’s thought processes, cognitive-behavioral therapists assist patients in applying these processes to their daily actions. The therapist might have the patient record a journal in order to keep track of their thought processes and catch self-destructive, unhelpful thoughts. The therapist also might assign the patient a homework assignment that’ll assist them in learning to think positively, such as meeting up with a friend (McLeod,