Theoretical approaches in psychology

YOUR ASSIGNMENT IS TO WRITE A COHERENT PAPER DESCRIBING YOUR DEVELOPING VIEW OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR, PERSONALITY AND COUNSELING.

Please organize your paper into seven separate sections. The seven roman numerals that follow contain descriptions of these seven major sections. At the beginning of each section of your paper, please type the capital, boldfaced words from each roman numeral listed below.

This position paper is designed to allow you to integrate and synthesize material. It is far more important to put ideas together in useful ways than to simply collect and/or repeat what others have written. Nonetheless, the paper should be well referenced and scholarly. You are strongly encouraged to cite primary sources in addition to any textbooks that you might utilize. Although you have been requested to identify seven separate sections in your paper, it will be evaluated as a total, integrated, internally consistent, and synthetic product in which clarity, logic, and thoroughness are extremely important. Please paginate (or number) your pages.

I. MAJOR INFLUENCES: Present a coherent explanation of the theory (or combination of theories) that you use to inform your psychotherapeutic approach. Specifically, we want to know where you stand theoretically, and how this affects your understanding of clients and focuses your interventions. Please place particular emphasis on the parts of the theory (or combination of theories) that are most crucial to your work with clients.

II. YOUR VALUE SYSTEM AND BELIEFS: In Section I, you wrote about how your psychotherapeutic approach has been influenced by theory. In this section, please address how your personal values and beliefs regarding the nature of human experience inform your emerging psychotherapeutic approach. Describe specific points of convergence and divergence between your psychological approach and your value systems and beliefs.

III. CONTRASTS WITH OTHER APPROACHS: Please contrast your psychotherapeutic approach with the central elements of at least one other formal system of psychotherapy not mentioned in item I. In other words, how is your approach different from this other (or these other) approach(es)?