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Listen to Me First Week One Transcript

Speakers: Host, Del

HOST Welcome to this week’s podcast for theory and practice, human services and criminal justice. Each weekly podcast is an interview with a subject matter expert who will provide a brief overview of the weekly objectives and how you can apply them in the field of criminal justice and security. Let me introduce you to our subject matter expert, Del, who has been in the field for over twenty years and currently he is working as a clinical consultant for the state of Utah.

This week we’ll be discussing theories of psychotherapy and therapeutic techniques. Can you give us an example of an important historical event in psychotherapy and how it influenced the field today?

DEL One of the things that I would like to really do is to take a look at how our historical events may have impacted us so specifically, I am thinking of World War I and shellshock. As World War I progressed, we saw more and more soldiers coming home with no physical wounds but certainly some psychological ones.

Some had the inability to speak or perhaps lost movement in a right arm or a leg with really no seeming explanation for that. One of the things that came about is that they discovered that just by talking about the disorder that somehow soldiers began to get better and so I think if we look at some of those kinds of historical events with relationship to psychotherapy, we can get a better understanding of how things developed and how, you know, we gained things specifically for post-traumatic stress disorder kinds of treatments.

HOST What psychotherapy or therapeutic theorist do you think made the most significant contribution to the field and what was that contribution?

DEL You know, when I think about this, I often sort of ponder a little bit about Freud and although he is really not invoked today, I think as the father of psychotherapy, he was really the first to kind of take a look at the origins of why we do what it is that we do and how we come to the conclusions that we do.

So when I kind of look at this whole idea, I really do think that Freud is more than just sort of the father. He’s the one who kind of started the ball rolling if you will.

HOST What approaches, skills, or techniques of psychotherapy are most frequently used by criminal justice professionals and why?

DEL You know, I think that traditional psychoanalysts kind of took a look at the main goal of their approach which was to make the unconscious conscious. So I sometimes will give the explanation of kind of the iceberg theory and that is that while we may see the tip of the iceberg, there is a lot of stuff underneath. Sometimes I’ll even draw an iceberg on the board to help to explain this theory.

The idea is that criminal justice professionals kind of take a look at what might be going on on the surface, and then they spend some additional time in looking at what is really going on underneath. So it is only by understanding sort of the whole concept of sort of that unconscious versus conscious idea that folks are able to improve and get better. And so criminal justice professionals will often kind of look at this approach to understand why a person is doing what it is that they’re doing.

HOST Consider these concepts as you read your materials, complete your assignments, and answer this week’s discussion questions. Follow up with your instructor if you have any questions.

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