Intensity in psychology means the pursuit of something, the direction of human thinking. At the heart of this direction is the desire to carry out a certain action. Maybe both conscious and unconscious.
Types of intentions:
- Effective - leads a person to action;
- speech - the intention to say something.
The author of logotherapy Frankl proposed a method of getting rid of fears and rejection of anything by a paradoxical intention. This method is used in two cases:
- When a certain symptom causes a person to fear about their repetition. There is an obsessive fear of waiting and the symptom is really repeated, this reinforces the person's primary fears, forming a vicious circle.
- Obsessions impose on the patient, he tries to resist it, but his efforts only aggravate the situation.
Neither flight, nor opposition to a negative symptom or fear can not eradicate it. To combat it, it is necessary to break the mechanisms of a closed circle. You can do this by heading to meet your fear. The method of Frankl's paradoxical intent is based on the fact that the patient must want to realize what he is afraid of.
An example: a boy of nine years regularly urinated in bed, parents and shamed his son and beat - to no avail. The doctor, to whom they applied for help, told the boy that he would give him 5 cents for every wet bed. The patient was glad that he would be able to earn money on his shortage, but he could not piss in bed any more. The boy got rid of the symptom as soon as he wished for his performance.
The method of paradoxical intention is very effective even in severe cases. Fear is pumped by the man himself. As soon as the patient meets his fear, he will disappear. Also the method is effective in case of insomnia, once a person decides that he will be awake all night, a dream comes to him.