Clinical Psychologist
In addition to treatments such as addiction detoxification and drug treatment, addiction psychology and psychological treatments provide great help in treating, preventing relapse, returning and rehabilitating the addicts. The implementation of psychotherapy can enhance the effects of drug therapy. Psychological interventions are an inevitable part of the treatment of drug dependence. The purpose of psychotherapy for addicts is to use the principles, concepts and findings of psychology in the treatment of drug dependents. Psychotherapy can lead to increased motivation, social support, learning communication skills, and how to deal with problems associated with drug use. An important element in returning to addiction is the psychological driver rather than psychological need i.e. the addict is going to re-use, so it is considered as a very important phenomenon in psychotherapy, prevention of relapse or return. The first explanation for addiction and its treatment was introduced by psychoanalysts. Subsequently, cognitive-behavioral views and pariah approaches also paid their attention to addiction future studies.
Psychologists who follow the psychoanalytic view of addiction know the root of addiction in psychological conflict. Addiction is a sign of fundamental disturbances, incomplete performance, a lack of emotional functioning and object relationships, and in general it is caused by psychological problems that are sign of major emotional problems. Psychoanalysts consider the resolving of psychological conflict in treating the problems of substance dependents and believe that by eliminating these conflicts, addiction will be resolved. Based on newer approaches to psychoanalysis, addiction is derived from defective defensive and adaptive functions and disturbed object relationships. In these approaches, the therapist has a role as a teacher or counsel that emphasizes the teaching of drug dependents to affiliates in order to cease the dependencies.
According to Eduard Khanstzian, a psychiatrist, substance abuse is a result of an individual’s efforts to strengthen his sense of weakness and a compensation for his/her incomplete performance. Accordingly, the goal of the treatment is to help the patient to increase his/her performance and achieve insight. Khanstzian also considers prevention of return and self-help as important elements of treatment. He has devised a psycho-dynamic method to treat dependents of group therapy therapies.
