Person-centred Psychodynamic Perspectives

Abstract

A psychodynamic approach is person-centred in its deep sense as it applies to the person with his/her unique personality and life history. Psychodynamic skills and experiences help to understand symptoms not just as dysfunctions and deficits but as dynamic phenomena with their own understandable function and logic. Psychodynamic expertise helps to deal with complex decisions in diagnosis and treatment. In addition, a psychodynamic approach is context-oriented as it includes a perspective to the complexity of a health care situation. Unconscious processes and communication take place virtually everywhere in different clinical settings, e.g. in the therapist-patient relationship, in the whole atmosphere of a hospital unit, and among colleagues. Therefore, it is useful to understand difficult situations and communication problems in daily clinical work by applying psychodynamic skills (e.g., self-reflection and self-monitoring of transference and counter-transference feelings). This could take place in supervision groups, case conferences or staff meetings of an interdisciplinary team in medical settings, such as surgical, emergency unit, general medicine, liaison medicinal, and psychiatric settings.