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Phases of Psychotherapy

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121 views2 pages

Phases of Psychotherapy

Uploaded by

Jaika
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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PHASES OF PSYCHOTHERAPY

Beginning Phase

The beginning stage of therapy has for its principle objective the establishing of a working
relationship with the client. Without such mutuality, there will be no therapeutic progress.
Because the working relationship is so vital to success in a therapy, all tasks must be
subordinated to the objective of its achievement. To ensure an adequate working relationship the
client must be motivated by
 Clarifying and removing misconception about therapy.
 To convince the client that the therapist understands his sufferings and is capable of
helping him.
 Defining the objective of the therapy.

Middle Phase

Once the therapeutic relationship is consolidated, and the client has accepted a more active role
of working on his problem, then it’s time to enter middle stage of treatment. This has as one of
its objectives the revelation of the causes and consequences of the client’s disorder. Middle
phase is further divided into:

Early middle phase: Main objective of early middle phase is to delineate and explore
environmental frustrations and maladaptive interpersonal drives through interviewing, and to
probe unconscious conflicts that mobilize anxiety and vitiate basic needs.

Late middle phase: Main objective of a therapist in late middle phase is to help the client to make
changes in the maladaptive behaviour and give incentive for those changes. He also helps the
client in dealing with forces that block action, mastering the anxieties surrounding normal life
goals, correcting remediable environmental distortions, adjusting to irremediable conditions,
making adjustment to those symptoms and abnormal character patterns that for one reason or
another cannot be removed during present therapeutic effort.
Terminal Phase

Theoretically, psychotherapy is never ending since emotional growth can go on as long as one
lives. In a more usual and limited sense, psychotherapy should be terminated when the stated
goals are reached. The terminal phase necessarily begins with therapist and client taking stock of
his/her current status and future prospects and deciding whether goals are closely enough
approached. Although termination can occur even before the goals are reached. The conditions
under which termination of therapy is indicated are:
 Achievement by the client of planned treatment goals.
 Decision by the client or therapist to terminate on the basis of incomplete goals.
 The reaching of an impasse in therapy or the development of stubborn resistances that
cannot be resolved.
 Counter-transference the therapist is unable to control and
 Occurrence of physical reasons, such as moving of the residence of client or therapist.

It is also important to discuss here how long these therapies take to bring about a change in a
client. According to Frank (1973) therapeutic changes occur in phases and it starts with
 restitution of well – being (remorlization),
 followed by a relief of symptoms (remediation)
 and finally result in an improvement in functioning (rehabilitation).
Obviously, in order for a therapy to cross through all these phases adequate number of sessions
will be required. But what is that optimal number? Though it is tough to give ‘a size that fits all’
number; however, based on the number of sessions proposed about various techniques such as
CBT and IPT, it seems 8 to 12 weeks of twice weekly sessions are required followed by
maintenance treatment at long-intervals. It is to be noted that if the client is not responding to
therapy after many sessions the therapist should reevaluate the suitability of the therapeutic
technique chosen. Likewise, even if the client has responded well, too many sessions might
prove counterproductive or resulting in diminishing returns.

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