A client who is resentful about her mother’s authority over her might show angry, rebellious behavior toward the psychoanalyst.

Resistance can take many different forms, such as coming late to sessions, forgetting to pay for sessions, and expressing hostility toward the psychoanalyst.

Jane has a repressed childhood memory of being punished by her father after walking into her parents’ bedroom while they were having sex. This memory comes into her conscious mind while she is undergoing psychotherapy. Subsequently, she feels a release of tension and is able to relate the incident to her current aversion toward sex.

Rational-emotive therapy is a type of cognitive-behavioral therapy started by the psychologist Albert Ellis. In this therapy, the therapist directly challenges the client’s irrational beliefs. Ellis’s therapy hinges on the idea that people’s feelings are influenced not by negative events but by their catastrophic thoughts and beliefs about these events. Ellis points out that catastrophic thinking is based on irrational assumptions about what one must do or be. His therapy aims to identify catastrophic thinking and change the irrational assumptions that underlie it.

A person might develop a fear of high places after experiencing an avalanche on a mountain trail. The avalanche is the unconditioned stimulus, and any high place becomes the conditioned stimulus, producing anxiety similar to that evoked by the avalanche.

Systematic desensitization is a type of exposure therapy. Exposure therapies are commonly used to treat phobias. These therapies recognize the fact that people maintain phobias by avoiding anxiety-producing situations, and they involve eliminating anxiety responses by having clients face a real or imagined version of the feared stimulus. In recent years, therapists have started using virtual reality devices to help clients experience feared stimuli.

Flooding is a more extreme type of exposure therapy than systematic desensitization. In flooding, exposure to anxiety-producing stimuli is sudden rather than gradual. For example, the person with the fear of heights would be taken to a mountain trail. No avalanche happens, so the person’s anxiety is extinguished.

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a method that some therapists use to treat problems such as post–traumatic stress disorder and panic attacks. This treatment is a type of exposure therapy in which clients move their eyes back and forth while recalling memories that are to be desensitized. Many critics of EMDR claim that the treatment is no different from a standard exposure treatment and that the eye movements do not add to the effectiveness of the procedure.

A therapist might give an alcoholic a nausea- producing drug along with alcoholic drinks.

Many doctors and psychologists criticize aversion therapy as both inhumane and ineffective. Therapists have sometimes used aversion therapy for controversial ends. For example, in the past, therapists used aversion therapy to “treat” homosexuality.

A token economy is a behavior modification program based on operant conditioning principles. Token economies are sometimes successfully used in institutional settings, such as schools and psychiatric hospitals. People receive tokens for desirable behaviors, such as getting out of bed, washing, and cooperating. These tokens can be exchanged for rewards, such as candy or TV-watching time.

Many therapists use an integrative approach, which means they use the perspectives and techniques of many different schools of psychology rather than adhering rigidly to one school. For example, a therapist might use a psychodynamic approach to understand the unconscious motivations influencing a client’s behavior, a client-centered approach when interacting empathically with the client, and a cognitive-behavioral approach to suggest strategies that may help the client cope with problems.

Existential therapies aim to help clients find meaning in their lives. They address concerns about death, alienation from other people, and freedom. Existential therapists, like humanistic therapists, believe that people are responsible for their own lives.