Theory and Practice of

Counseling and Psychotherapy

Psych422
Chapter 5: Adlerian Therapy
Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy - Chapter 5
Questions
 What do you think about Alderian
approach?

 What do you know about Alderian

approach?
 View of Human Nature
 Stress choice and responsibility, meaning in
life, and the striving for success, completion,
and perfection.

 Focuson inferiority feelings---motivate to

strive for success (superiority)

 Focus on subjective experiences

Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy - Chapter 5
 Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology
 A phenomenological approach
 Social interest is stressed
 Birth order and sibling relationships
 Therapy as teaching, informing and encouraging
 Basic mistakes in the client’s private logic
 The therapeutic relationship — a collaborative
partnership

Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy - Chapter 5

 Material Cause
 Efficient Cause
 Formal Cause
 Final Cause
3 main life task
 Work
 Community
 Love

All psychopathology avoid these life tasks.

Creativity
 People are viewed as actors and not as
reactors
 The Phenomenological Approach
 Adlerians attempt to view the world from
the client’s subjective frame of reference
 How life is in reality is less important than
how the individual believes life to be
 It is not the childhood experiences that are
crucial – it is our present interpretation of
these events
 Unconscious instincts and our past do not
determine our behavior
Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy - Chapter 5
 Social Interest
 Adler’s most significant and distinctive concept
 Social interest: a sense of identification and empathy
with others.
 Community feeling: a sense of social connectedness
 Happiness and success are largely related to social
connectedness
 Many problems are related to the fear of not being
accepted by the groups we values. Then, anxiety is
the result.

Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy - Chapter 5

Birth Order
 What are the unique characteristics of each
birth order?
1) Oldest child –
2) Second of only two –
3) Middle –
4) Youngest –
5) Only child –
 Birth Order
 Adler’s five psychological positions:
1) Oldest child – receives more attention, spoiled,
center of attention
2) Second of only two – behaves as if in a race, often
opposite to first child
3) Middle – often feels squeezed out
4) Youngest – the baby
5) Only – does not learn to share or cooperate with other
children, learns to deal with adults
Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy - Chapter 5
Therapeutic Goals
 Collaborative relationship
 Develop a sense of belonging.
 Encouragement is the most powerful method
available for changing a person’s beliefs
 Helps build self-confidence and stimulates courage
 Discouragement is the basic condition that prevents
people from functioning
 Clients are encouraged to recognize that they have
the power to choose and to act differently
Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy - Chapter 5
 Therapist’s function and role
 Help to identify major mistakes
 Lack of confidence, mistrust….


 Gathering information through family

constellation, early recollections, or lifestyle
assessment.

 Understanding, challenging, and changing their

life story and develop an alternative story
Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy - Chapter 5
 Client’s Experience in Therapy
 Do not recognize the basic mistake or private logic
 Views of self, others, and life based on a person’s
lifestyle
 Help to discover the motivation of basic mistake
 Do not know what to do differently
 Fear of letting go the old patterns for unpredictable
new alternative options
 Cling to old patterns even though it is unsuccessful
Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy - Chapter 5
Relationship b/w Therapist and
Client
 Cooperation, mutual trust, respect
 Making a contract with clients
 Detail what they (clients) want
 How they plan
 What is preventing them from reaching goals
 How to change unproductive behavior into
constructive behavior
 How to make use of their strengths
Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy - Chapter 5
Therapeutic Techniques and
Procedures
 1. Establishing the relationship
 Collaborative relationship, deep caring and
involvement
 Identity personal issues
 Focus on person not the problem
 Increase the awareness of strengths
 Focus on subjective experiences and core
patterns
Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy - Chapter 5
 Therapeutic Techniques and
Procedures
 2. Exploring the individual’s dynamics
 Client tells his or her story; clients as experts
 The motivation behind coping strategies
 Therapist is like a “lifestyle investigator”
 Family Constellation
 Early Recollections
 Personality priorities
 Integration and summary
Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy - Chapter 5
Family constellation
 Who are the favorite child?
 What was your father’s relationship with thie children?
Your mother’s?
 Which child was most life your father? Your mother? In
what respects?
 Who among the siblings was most different from you? In
What ways?
 Who among the siblings was most like you? In what ways?
 What were you like as child?
 How did your parents get along? In what did they both
agree? How did they handle disagreements? How did they
discipline the children?
Early recollections
 Three earliest memory
 What part does the person take in the memory? Is the
person an observer or a participant?
 Who else is in the memory? What position do others take
in relation to the person?
 What are the dominant themes and overall patterns of the
memories?
 What feelings are expressed in the memories?
 Why does the person choose to remember this event?
What is the person trying to convey?
Personality priorities
 Superiority (or significance)
 Control
 Comfort
 Pleasing
Integration and summary
 Five basic mistake
 Overgeneralizations
 Impossible goals
 Misperceptions of life and life’s demands
 Minimization or denial of one’s basic worth
 Faulty values
Therapeutic Techniques and
Procedures
 3. Encouraging self-understanding and
insight
 Insight: an understanding of motivations that
operate in a client’s life
 Disclosure and interpretations are techniques
that facilitate the process of gaining insight.
Therapeutic Techniques and
Procedures
 4. Helping with reorientation
 Putting insights into practice
 Useful side of life
 Sense of belonging and being valued
 Useless side of life
 Withdrawal from life tasks or self-protection
Therapeutic Techniques and
Procedures
 4. Helping with reorientation
 Encouragement
 No intervention is more important than
encouragement
 Help clients identify self-defeating patterns

 Make use of assets, strengths, and resources

 Search for new possibilities

 Making a difference
Areas of implications
 Education
 Parent education
 Marriage counseling
 Family counseling
 Group work
Adlerian therapy From
multicultural perspectives
 Contributions to multicultural counseling
 Social equality, sensitive to cultural and
gender issues
 Focus on a person in a social context
 Social interests, sense of belonging,
cooperation (instead of competition)
 Focus on family
 Subjective experience (unique world of a
person)
Adlerian therapy From
multicultural perspectives
 Limitations to multicultural counseling
 Self as the locus of change and responsibility
may be problematic for some clients
 Detailed explorations of one’s early family
experiences may violate some cultural value
 Some clients may expect therapists to provide
them with solutions to the problems
Summary and evaluation
 Contributions of Adlerian approach

 Limitations of Adlerian approach