Question

Compare and contrast the following forms of psychotherapy: cognitive, humanistic, and behavioral. Identify the focus of each approach as well as areas of agreement and difference.

our response must contain a minimum of 300 words and a maximum of 1000 words, though individual prompts or your instructor may provide a more precise target range for word count.

Answer 1

Note: This response is in UK English, please paste the response to MS Word and you should be able to spot discrepancies easily. You may elaborate the answer based on personal views or your classwork if necessary.

(Answer) Cognitive Psychotherapy: This is a form of psychotherapy that is short-termed and focused on a range of psychological issues that include anxiety, depression, conflict, loneliness, fear, eating disorders, substance abuse etc. It basically aims to cure the mental process that causes certain outward manifestations of emotion and behaviour that are deemed psychologically unhealthy.

Behavioural Psychotherapy: This is a tangent of cognitive therapy. Behavioural therapy is extensive in the sense that it involves a lot of research and observation that would lead to understanding a particular behaviour, its origins and a viable solution. Since thoughts and behaviour are connected, cognitive and behavioural research are also complementary to each other.

Humanistic Psychotherapy: This unique form of psychotherapy is almost as unique as a diagnostician would be in a panel of specialist surgeons. The job of a humanistic psychotherapist would be to undertake unique cases and establish a friendly and comfortable relationship with the patient in order to find the cause of the problem.

Commonalities: The common thing about all of these therapeutic techniques is that they all seek to get to the core of the external manifestations of the issue. For instance, there is a patient has a unique fear of apples that have a behavioural manifestation of walking away from an apple each time he sees one. All three therapists would use their individual techniques that are outlined by their specialist field, in order to find out what actually caused this fear in the first place. Each of the doctors would attempt to know more about the patient’s childhood, particular incidents, triggers, the degree of fear and anxiety and other details in order to get to the core. In other words, all three specialists would believe that the answer to finding the solution is at the beginning of the problem.

Difference: The major difference in this field clearly lies in the technique that they would all use in order to find the cause of the problem. The behavioural therapists would record an account of the patient’s history of behaviour around apples. The cognitive therapists would record the types of emotions, patterns in temperament etc. The humanistic therapist would attempt to be good friends with the patient in order to extract the most intimate details about the patient. All of these attempts would be made, simply to find out how and when the problem began. It would be the dynamics of the patient’s past that would lead to finding a solution eventually.