COUNSELING THEORIES

Counseling Theories

Table of Contents

Introduction3

Psychoanalytic Theory3

Literacy and Psychoanalytic Theory3

Learning, counseling and Psychoanalytic Thought4

Rogers and the Person-Centered Approach5

Humanistic-Existential Counseling theory8

Cognitive Theory9

Cognitive Development Theory9

Moral Development Theory10

Social Learning Theory12

The Statement of the Theory13

References15

Counseling Theories

Introduction

Theories of counseling are considered to be the building blocks of any profession. Almost every counselor has had at least one course in theories of counseling. Some of the major and famous names of the counseling theories are Sigmund Freud, Carl Rogers, and others. This paper will address some of the major theories of counseling and why they are so important.

Psychoanalytic Theory

Psychoanalytic theory is an affected theory, in the sense that the key problems of concern focus on the human's capacity for unity and destruction and for incoherence and paradox. Further, psychoanalytic theory includes the idea that the theorist is subject to and embodies every one of its concepts, including resistance to psychoanalytic theory. Just as educational theory must draw from the childhood of the theorist's education in the sense that the theorist is never a stranger to education, so, too, does a psychoanalytic theory lean upon the thinker's intrapsychic and interpsychic projective identifications, ego defenses, wishes, and unconscious life. What separate psychoanalytic theory from educational theory, however, are the former's involvement in the subject's madness, breakdowns, incoherence, and unconscious life, with the view that because the human's condition is a nervous condition, it is subject to fantasy, to projections, and to the confusion of pleasure and pain or good and bad (Saretsky, 2008).

Literacy and Psychoanalytic Theory

Psychoanalytic theory is an index of what the social excludes. It would thus be curious about censorship, gaps in memory, fear of ideas, and symbolic impoverishment. Given that any curriculum presents signifiers of learning and ignorance, psychoanalytic theory may be approached as positing, inviting, and rectifying our original literacy. Learning to freely associate with this paradoxical theory, which in fact may question why we have theory at all, requires a revision of knowledge, an open mind, and an ongoing curiosity about why we feel we must shut up.

Learning, counseling and Psychoanalytic Thought

Learning is presented as the means to change not only what is in one's mind but the mind's structure. The mind's content, however is seen through a psychological prism, expressing, though displacement and condensation, the drives and idiomatic desire. Ideas are erotically linked to images, people, fantasy, fragments of lost events and relations, and to pieces of the body, all named “objects” or “imagos.” The ongoing problem of learning entails learning to live with others on the way to becoming an “I.” Education is presented as both needed and as subject to its own pathologies. Any learning is learning from uncertainty and conflict and therefore becomes the capacity to tolerate the mental pain of thinking from the unknowable and the incomplete. Yet this means that learning is inextricably tied to anxiety, a signal of danger that links the external and internal worlds. The interest is in moving from frustration to symbolization. Although this view of the human leans on what is tragic in the ...