Theories

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Case Theories

Back 1

Explain the behavior of one person (an individual spouse abuser)

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Mid-range theories

Back 2

Explains a set of cases or events (for example, the behavior of unemployed alcoholic men who abuse their spouses)

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Grand Theories

Back 3

Attempt to explain all sets of events and cases (such as Frued's theory of psychosexual development or Piaget's theory of the stages of cognitive development)

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Practice Theory

Back 4

A coherent set of ideas about human nature, including concepts of health, illness, normalcy, and deviance, which provide verifiable or established explanations for behavior and rationales for intervention

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Functions of Theory

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Simplify complex phenomena, focus practitioner's attention on thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and events in a clients life
Help the social worker to establish causal relationships and predict future behavior
Simply the task of selecting outcomes of intervention
Guiding social worker about effective intervention

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4 major assumptions of Ego Psychology

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1. People are born with innate capacity to adapt to their environment and further develops through learning and psychosocial maturation
2. Social influence on psychological functioning are significant (mainly through family unit)
3. The innate drives of mastery and competence are important motivators of human behavior
4. Problems in social functioning can occur at any stage of development, due to person-environment, as well as internal, conflicts

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Ego Psychology "the drives"

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1. Mastery and competence: Mastery a person's ability to influence his or her environment and competence is one's subjective feeling about that ability
2.Pleasure
3.Aggression
Pleasure and aggression bring people into conflict with social norms; master and competence considered conflict-free

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The Ego

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negotiates between internal needs and outside world, functions partly unconscious; mediates internal conflicts and the interactions of a person.

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Ego Functions

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Awareness of the external environments: accurate perception of the external world
Judgment: capacity to choose behaviors that are likely to promote our movement toward goals
Sense of identity: sense of self
Impulse control: ability to distinguish between primary (drives/impulses) and secondary (planned) mental processes
Thought process regulations: ability to remember, concentrate, and assess situations to initiate appropriate action
Interpersonal (object) relations: ability to manage relationships appropriately and ability to see other people as unique rather than replications from past
Defense mechanisms: distortions of reality that minimize anxiety
Stimulus regulations: ability to screen and select external stimuli to stay focused
Autonomous functions: capacity to mantain attention, concentration, memory, or learning

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Defense Mechanisms

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Unconscious, automatic responses that enable us to minimize perceived threats or keep them out of awareness entirely. Defenses include: Denial, Displacement, intellectualization, introjection, isolation of affect, projection, rationalization, reaction formation, regression, repression, somatization, sublimation, undoing (See pg. 39-40 for definitions).

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Psychodynamic Theory

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Id: represented innate drives, ego part of the mind that adapted the drives to socially accepetable outlets and the superego represented the conscience or internalized value system.

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Object Relations Theory

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Refers to our internalized attitudes toward others and the self, and how those attitudes determine our approach to new relationships. Term object refers to humans

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Object Relations Major Concepts

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Attachment theory; introjection: the psychological taking in of the characteristics of others; Representation: the content, or result, of introjection; Object relations: set of person's internalized attitudes toward other people and toward self; Object: actual person or one's mental representation of a person; Part-object: one-several characteristics we have internalized about a person but not "total" person; Splitting: others into part objects; Whole object: internalization of all aspects of another person; Self-object: internal representation of one's own self; True-self: self-image where we recognize we posses characteristics and needs and work for those needs; False Self: self-image where needs are devalued and suppressed; Object constancy: mature psychological state where we obtain whole-object representation of sig. people

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Relational Theory

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The basic human tendency (or drive) is relationships with others, and our personalities are structured through ongoing interacts with others in the social environments.

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Family (Emotional) Systems Theory

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Provides a comprehensive conceptual framework for understanding how emotional ties within families of origin (including extended family members) influence the lives of individuals in ways they often fail to appreciate and may tend to minimize