What is the difference between Cognitive-Behavioral therapy and Psychodynamic psychotherapy?
Behavioral therapy, in its pure form such as conditioning is really not much different from animal training. You can teach an animal to respond to behavioral or verbal commands, but the animal doesn t have to understand a thing about it s own behavior; it responds simply to reinforcement or fear of punishment. But most Cognitive-Behavioral therapies are a blend of behavioral techniques and cognitive techniques hence the name Cognitive-Behavioral and so they do involve some amount of thoughtful awareness. Still, this sort of awareness does not need to be extensive. You could compare it to learning to drive a car and stopping at a stop sign simply because you tell yourself that if you don t stop you run the risk of being pursued by the police and fined. There s some philosophical processing going on here, but it s not necessarily very sophisticated. And so, in the same way, learning to take deep breaths when angry, for example, is relaxing, but it s a relatively simple process. In contra
