ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the considerable influence of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches upon contemporary mental health care with individuals. It explores the psychodynamic approach to working with individuals. The chapter presents some psychodynamic interventions, illustrated with examples from contemporary mental health care practice. The psychodynamic approach has its beginnings in the study of human experience, motivations and development at the beginning of the twentieth century. Defence mechanisms are reversible and can be adaptive, as well as problematic. Adaptive use of defence mechanisms helps people to achieve their goals in acceptable ways. Defence mechanisms become problematic when they interfere with functioning, relationships and orientation to reality. The topographical metaphor of an iceberg has been employed to understand the relationship between the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious. The psychodynamic approach works on assumptions that feelings and ideas arising from actual events become repressed into the unconscious and manifest themselves as ‘symptoms’, dreams, slips of the tongue.
