Modern psychology has no single definition of the term “psychotherapy”. The concept of psychotherapy belongs to the class of blurred concepts whose meaning is clear to each person separately but which everyone finds hard to agree on together. This is probably where the problem field of modern psychotherapy begins.
The first step is the choice of a philosophy, or of the personal preferences, that the psychotherapist will follow in their work. In today’s world there are many schools of psychotherapy: gestalt therapy, psychoanalysis, behavioural therapy and others. The chosen school sets a certain frame for the choice of methods and techniques for working with the client, and there is a huge number of those.
One of the main problems is the paradigm within which psychotherapy is considered: the medical one or the psychological one, and the two differ substantially.
It can be said that the mission of psychotherapy (of psychological practice) is to answer the challenges of life and of the times and to help the client (an individual, a family, a group, an organisation) to take up those challenges of life and of the times and to realise their potential in answering them in such a way as to sustain their quality of life and, in the broad sense, their health, their ability to develop and their readiness to take on new challenges and cope with them.
An important point is that ordinary university education is not enough to work as a psychotherapist. There is a separate programme here, with a number of conditions to be met.
It is worth noting that there are views according to which psychotherapy does not meet the criteria of science — above all, its results are not reproducible. A great many questions also arise about what is to be counted as objective. Many researchers hold that psychotherapy has no object and no subject matter of its own. At the same time, however, not one psychotherapeutic or psychological theory underlying psychotherapy can be refuted.
In psychotherapy the personality of the psychotherapist, their motivation and their involvement matter a great deal. What is distinctive about the profession lies first and foremost in a particular attitude towards the other person, who is in fact the object of the therapist’s professional work. This shows itself in the need for the following obligatory rules and attitudes towards the client to be present in a psychotherapist’s work.
• Careful treatment of the client’s secrets;
• Trust in the client’s story;
• Understanding of the client;
• A non-judgemental attitude towards the client, and so on.
As for the personality of the psychotherapist, one should keep in mind the style of communication and possible psycholinguistic mistakes (for example: the use of the particle “not”, of notions such as “better–worse” and so on).
Another problem is that many clients see the therapist as a magician and a wizard. They believe that the psychotherapist will solve all their problems in one or two sessions.
Psychotherapy has been growing more and more popular of late. Unfortunately, one also comes across therapists who “make a business” out of it — for instance, by building networks of training seminars that follow the principles and laws of any network marketing scheme exactly, and so on.
Psychotherapy has existed throughout the historical past we can survey. At first it was practised by chieftains and priests. Psychotherapy was spiritual in character, it was an art. Then humanists and traditional practitioners took it up. In their hands psychotherapy became a craft
Scientific psychotherapy, young as it is, has already made a substantial contribution to the development of modern man.
In conclusion it can be said that psychotherapy is an interactive process of putting into psychological order the past, the present and the future of a person, a family, a group or society as a whole, for the sake of a goal that has been set.
