Counseling and Helping Relationships
Orientation by orientation
Know each theory's core mechanism, signature technique, and key figure.
Psychoanalytic: unconscious conflict, defense mechanisms, transference and countertransference, free association, interpretation; Freud, with object relations (Mahler, Kernberg) and self psychology (Kohut) as descendants. Adlerian: inferiority striving, social interest, birth order, lifestyle; early recollections, "The Question," encouragement. Person-centered: Rogers's core conditions - unconditional positive regard, empathy, congruence; nondirective and present-focused. Existential: Frankl, May, Yalom; the givens of death, freedom, isolation, meaninglessness, and the confrontation of choice and responsibility. Gestalt: Perls; awareness, unfinished business, top-dog/underdog splits; the empty chair and here-and-now experiments. Behavioral: conditioning, reinforcement, exposure, systematic desensitization (Wolpe), behavioral rehearsal. CBT: Beck's cognitive triad and automatic thoughts; REBT: Ellis's ABCDE and disputing irrational beliefs. Reality therapy: Glasser's choice theory and WDEP (wants, doing, evaluation, planning). Solution-focused: de Shazer and Berg; miracle question, exceptions, scaling. Narrative: White and Epston; externalizing the problem, re-authoring. Feminist: gender and power analysis with an egalitarian relationship. Family systems: Bowen (differentiation, triangles, genogram), Minuchin (boundaries, enmeshment), Haley (strategic directives).
Traps: assigning the empty chair to CBT; confusing REBT's B (belief) with behavior; forgetting that person-centered work de-emphasizes technique; misassigning "resistance" (psychoanalytic and strategic traditions use it; solution-focused reframes it as cooperation).
Rule of thumb: in technique-matching items, ask "whose theory coined this term?" before reading the answer choices.