Psychoanalysis Crisis Intervention Techniques 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which concept best explains why unresolved grief from earlier losses can intensify a current crisis?
- Secondary gain
- Cumulative trauma and reactivated loss (Correct answer)
- Paranoid-schizoid position defense
- Countertransference disclosure
Correct answer: Cumulative trauma and reactivated loss
New losses often reactivate earlier unresolved grief, compounding the emotional load and intensifying the crisis response.
Question 2: In psychoanalytic crisis work, interpreting defenses too early is problematic because:
- It accelerates ego strengthening
- It can strip away coping mechanisms the client needs to stay stabilized (Correct answer)
- It is only effective after six sessions
- It reinforces projective identification
Correct answer: It can strip away coping mechanisms the client needs to stay stabilized
Premature interpretation removes defenses before the client has the ego strength or new coping skills to tolerate the underlying anxiety.
Question 3: The 'ABC Model' of crisis intervention stands for:
- Affect, Behavior, Cognition
- Antecedent, Baseline, Crisis
- Achieving contact, Boiling down the problem, Coping skills (Correct answer)
- Assessment, Bonding, Closure
Correct answer: Achieving contact, Boiling down the problem, Coping skills
Myer's ABC Model sequences intervention as achieving contact, boiling the problem to basics, and developing coping skills.
Question 4: A person in acute crisis who refuses all help and denies any problem is most likely using which defense?
- Rationalization
- Denial (Correct answer)
- Displacement
- Intellectualization
Correct answer: Denial
Denial is a primitive defense that blocks awareness of a threatening reality, often seen acutely when the ego is overwhelmed.
Question 5: Providing concrete, practical assistance (e.g., helping call a shelter) during a crisis reflects which intervention principle?
- Neutrality and abstinence
- Active and directive engagement (Correct answer)
- Free association facilitation
- Paradoxical intention
Correct answer: Active and directive engagement
Effective crisis intervention often requires the counselor to be more active and directive than in ongoing therapy to address immediate needs.
Question 6: In the psychoanalytic framework, a client who displaces anger onto the crisis counselor is demonstrating:
- A healthy working alliance
- Transference driven by unconscious conflicts (Correct answer)
- Corrective emotional experience
- Secondary process thinking
Correct answer: Transference driven by unconscious conflicts
Displacement of affect onto the counselor reflects transference, where unconscious feelings from past relationships are redirected.
Question 7: Suicidal ideation in a crisis is best understood psychoanalytically as:
- A purely biological symptom requiring medication only
- Aggression turned inward against an introjected object (Correct answer)
- Evidence of a borderline personality disorder diagnosis
- A manipulative behavior with no unconscious meaning
Correct answer: Aggression turned inward against an introjected object
Freud and later theorists viewed suicidal impulses as aggression directed at an internalized love object toward whom the person also harbors rage.
Psychoanalysis Crisis Intervention Techniques 3
Which concept best explains why unresolved grief from earlier losses can intensify a current crisis?