ABSTRACT
Management of people in this phobia clinic is based on a theory that phobias result from misinterpretations of the effects of a natural process that generates fear in responses to imagined dangers as in a nightmare. With support, guidance, exposure, and information, phobic people learn in individual and group settings to confront, control, and understand their phobic experience.
Subject(s)
Phobic Disorders/therapy , Psychotherapy/methods , Adaptation, Psychological , Adult , Agoraphobia/therapy , Combined Modality Therapy , Hospitals, Psychiatric , Humans , Male , Middle Aged , Phobic Disorders/psychology , Self-Help GroupsABSTRACT
When phobic behavior is studied and analyzed as it changes in its natural contexts during treatment, new information develops about social, environmental, psychological, personality and bodily factors and their relationships in causing these changes. Contextual analysis, basing its approach on such studies, has conceptualized pathogenic (i.e., phobogenic) and therapeutic processes that have led to new approaches to treatment and a new understanding of familiar psychoanalytic phenomena. This effort to understand disturbed phobic behavior by analyses of innumerable samples of current change under varied conditions reverses the prevailing psychoanalytic approach of studying the reported past to understand the present, and makes possible the development of validatable concepts and more effective treatment, as well as setting the stage for more meaningful research and integration with other sciences.
Subject(s)
Phobic Disorders/therapy , Psychoanalytic Therapy/methods , Agoraphobia/therapy , Arousal , Humans , Panic , Phobic Disorders/psychology , Social EnvironmentABSTRACT
Contextual therapy of phobias is based upon the observation, analysis and conceptualization of phobic behavior as it changes in its natural contexts. Detailed, tape-recorded studies of phobic behavior changing in context were used to develop concepts and treatment of the processes governing change. Contextual therapy has been applied to individual, group, and self-help treatment of phobias.
