Psychoanalytic Theory Rational Emotive Behavioral Theory
Common Theoretical Constructs: Key Concepts: Key Concepts:
Goals of Group Counseling: Goals of Group Counseling:
Therapeutic Relationship/Leadership Style: Therapeutic Relationship/Leadership Style:
Techniques: Techniques:
• and early childhood experiences (primarily within
• Long-term group theory involving analyzing inner
• Understand how past impacts the group member’s present and future
• Make the unconscious conscious • Restructuring of personality
character structure
detachment, and relative anonymity to those who favor a collaborative relationship with group members • Movement towards embracing a more therapeutic relationship • Preferred model includes communicating care, interest, and involvement with group members
• Techniques geared towards increasing awareness, acquiring insight, and beginning a working-through process that will lead to reorganization of the personality • Free association, interpretation, dream analysis, analysis of resistance, analysis of transference
transference and countertransference
• Problems caused by our perceptions of life situations and our thoughts, not situations themselves, by others, or past events • Power and healing comes through overcoming irrational thinking
• Growth predicated on understanding of unconscious • Leadership style includes warmth and genuine care • Both theories focus on how clients interpret past experiences and adopt beliefs about those experiences • Techniques in both theories are awareness oriented
• Unconditional acceptance of group members • Group leaders teach members how to avoid rating and condemning themselves • Group leaders accept their clients as imperfect beings
• Blends techniques to change members’ patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting Coping self-statements, involving countering faulty beliefs with rational, coping self-statements • Confrontation of faulty thinking
• Eliminate a self-defeating outlook on life • Reduce unhealthy emotional responses • Identify faulty beliefs, replace with more constructive beliefs