Therapy

“ Carl Rogers defines therapy as "a relationship in which at least {24} one of the parties has the intent of promoting the growth, development, maturity, improved functioning, improved coping with life of the other." ”

“ These interrelated things—ability and willingness to change—simply are not present in many people who enter therapy. They come to therapy for a variety of other, often unconscious, reasons: for temporary comforting, for escape from an upsetting situation or environment, or for a chance to release painful feelings and to express painful thoughts. ”

“ This style of physic—this moral therapy—requires infinitely more tact and discernment than the application of the usual remedies of the pharmacopœia. Nor is it in our medical schools that young men, who intend to practise the healing art, can learn to diagnose and to treat those maladies wherein the soul wrecks the body. ”

“ Because of their differences in training and personal or theoretical preferences, the distinct classes of therapists represent a diversity of approaches to therapy. There are numerous schools of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, behavioral therapy, group therapy, and marriage and family therapy, and a range of approaches to personal adjustment, including exercise therapies, relaxation techniques, forms of meditation, and drug and nutrition therapies. ”

“ This is what must be done with regard to psychotherapy also. Just now its importance is being exaggerated by ardent advocates. In every department of therapy this has always been done by enthusiasts. The business of the practicing physician must be to select what is best, and above all what is sure and harmless, from the many suggestions offered, so as to build up a practical body of applied truth. ”

“ At present, the possibility of overcoming them depends heavily on clients themselves, their ability to find an approach to therapy that is appropriate for their personality and their goals or problems, and their good fortune in locating a therapist who is able to help them to summon the faith, energy, determination, and courage necessary to overcome their sense of demoralization. ”

“ Mental therapy and physical therapy ought to be most intimately connected parts of the same therapeutic effort and mental therapy includes by far more than mere suggestions and appeals. All that involves of course that its systematic application belongs in the hands of the well-trained physician and of nobody else, but on the other hand, it involves that every physician ought to be well schooled in psychology. ”

“ Psychotherapy, to take another example, is not a single approach to therapy, but rather makes up an entire field. It is the largest and most rapidly growing area relating to mental health. In it are included distinct approaches, such as client-centered therapy, Gestalt therapy, transactional analysis, rational-emotive therapy, existential-humanistic therapy, reality therapy, logotherapy, Adlerian therapy, emotional flooding therapies, and direct decision therapy. ”

“ It has remained for modern psychotherapy to strike the balance—to treat the whole man. Solidly planted on the rock of the physical sciences, with its laboratories, physiological and psychological, and with a long record of investigation and treatment of pathological cases, it resembles the mind cure of earlier days or the assertions of Christian Science about as much as modern medicine resembles the old bloodletting, leeching practices of our forefathers. ”

“ But as psycho-therapy itself becomes organized, works out its laws, develops its own science and particularly as the knowledge of all this is extended and popularized, they will lose their base of support. For this reason the writer believes that the final explanation of all faith and mental healing in terms of some form of suggestion which is just now strongly in evidence will prove a distinct service to us all. ”

“ In the past twenty to thirty years, there has been a gradual shift away from a medical, illness-based orientation in therapy to one that focuses on personal growth. By no means everyone enters therapy because of emotional pain. Increasingly, therapists are seeing clients who enjoy psychological and emotional good health but believe that therapy can help them lead fuller, richer, more satisfying lives. ”

“ Like the five psychotherapies described in Chapter 10, these focus special attention on a client's personal style of relating to the world and others. They all seek to help a person to free himself or herself from troubling feelings and negative attitudes and to replace these with a stronger and more confident self-concept. Each therapy is a different path to that goal. ”

“ You doctors, all of you, constantly practice psychotherapy, even when you do not know it, or do not intend it, but it has one disadvantage, you leave entirely to the patient the psychic factor of your influence. ”

“ Or, individuals who have problems due to excessive stress may, for example, be advised to combine biofeedback, relaxation training, hypnosis, meditation, or exercise therapy with a form of psychotherapy.
Usually, when therapies are combined, one is a formal psychotherapy and the other is an adjunctive therapy—that is, a therapy that most often is not relied on exclusively. Some adjunctive therapies lend themselves very well to use by individuals on their own. ”

“ If you are suffering from incapacitating anxiety or depression, being patient about the process of therapy can be very demanding. Long-term therapies require more patience, endurance, and tolerance than do short-term therapies. ”

“ The established approaches to therapy and counseling, represented by social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and to a certain extent by some religious professionals, all focus attention on our mental-psychological dimension. Similarly, biofeedback, hypnosis, and meditation emphasize the central role of mental control. ”

“ Therapy is an intrinsically human process, one that is especially sensitive to the human dimensions of therapists. Later we will look at objective evaluations of the effectiveness of various approaches to therapy and weigh them against the emphasis that clients place on the personal qualities of therapists. ”

“ Place of Psychotherapy in Treatment.—The role of psychotherapy, then, in heart cases consists in the recognition of the part that the mind, the will and the emotions play in their influence over this important organ. These psychic factors may produce disturbed conditions of various kinds. The more experience the physician has with cardiac cases of all kinds, organic as well as functional, the more powerful does he recognize the influence of the mind over the heart to be. The expression that a man is living on his will is no mere figure of speech. ”

“ These social demands—so critics of therapy have argued—have been internalized by most therapists so that therapies often do not really serve the individual's needs but rather the prevailing belief-system of society. ”

“ He says further that the wicked and the charlatan may enter upon the practice of psycho-therapy, but in a majority of cases, the sub-conscious mind, upon which the healer works, will reject the evil suggestion of the practitioner who strives to use his powers for malign purposes. ”

“ Christian Science ranges itself with the various theories of psycho-therapy that have been advanced from time to time, but its effect in the treatment of disease is of worth only as regards the suggestive power of mind over matter. ”

“ Just in the same way, our psychotherapy must be dosed out according to the special need of each individual, the form of the affection and the particular kind of mind that is to be dealt with. To learn the place of mental influence in healing, so that we shall not be attributing to other therapeutic factors what is really due to the mind, will be a great advance in therapeutics. ”

“ I knew that medical men, in their own unadvertised work, employ mental suggestion as a therapeutic means, rely upon it as a part of their armamentarium, and use it in appropriate cases, either alone or combined with other means of cure, as electricity, hydrotherapy, and drugs—which last, despite Mrs. Eddy's foolish denunciation, are quite as much entitled to be considered divinely appointed therapeutic agents as is mental suggestion. ”

“ They make up one way of describing the ideal outcomes of therapy. They are one side of the coin; the other side consists of the many negative feelings and ways of behaving that are {37} eliminated when they are displaced by these positive personality qualities. ”

“ Recognizing the force and reality of psycho-therapy Christian Science gets its power as a healing system from the great number of people who are open to its appeal and the shrewd combination of elements in the appeal itself. ”

“ Psychotherapy is the practice of treating the sick by influencing the mental life. It stands at the side of physicotherapy, which attempts to cure the sick by influencing the body, perhaps with drugs and medicines, or with electricity or baths or diet. ”

“ In fact, existential therapists are inclined to resist the formulation and application of specific techniques of therapy, believing that psychotherapy is essentially a human endeavor and that the drive to formulate techniques is basically a dehumanizing, objectifying interest. ”

“ As a matter of fact, the science of psychotherapy or mental treatment is simply the science of re-education,—a process designed to break up old unhealthy complexes which disrupt the forces of the individual, and to build up healthy complexes which adjust him to the social world and enable him to use his energy in useful ways. ”

“ If they thus find—as is likely—that the real force of Psycho-therapy has been largely overestimated, that imagination, wrong diagnosis and mistaken report as to the actual physical condition have all combined to produce confidences unjustified by the facts, we should begin to come out into the light. ”

“ You cannot apply treatment from without and expect that the patient will get better. The situation is much more complex than this. The patient—let's shift at this point to calling him or her the client—is much more actively involved in the process of psychotherapy than is a patient in medicine. ”

“ Wherever a psychical factor enters into the calculations of the physician either by reason of its own abnormality or by its relation as effect or as cause to a diseased part of the body in the brain or without, there we have a psychomedical task, and as far as it is therapeutic, we have psychotherapy. ”

“ PSEUDO-SCIENCE AND MENTAL HEALING
An interesting phase of psychotherapy is found in the history of the applications of new scientific discoveries to medicine. The development of every physical science has been followed by an attempt to apply its new principles and discoveries to the treatment of disease. Such applications have nearly always been followed by excellent results at the beginning. But almost without exception, the medical significance of these discoveries has, after a time, been found to be nil. ”

“ That the profession at large needs instruction in the practise of psychotherapy we are willing to admit; we believe that such instruction should be given at medical schools, to the end that the limitations as well as the possibilities of mental treatment should be laid down, so far as our present knowledge permits. ”

“ It is true that each specialist has, in the eyes of his colleagues in general practice, exaggerated the significance of his own department. This is true in all specialties, however, and psychotherapy deserves quite as much as any of the subjects we have mentioned to have a place among the text-books of medicine ”

“ According to the Patient. The treatment varies according to the nature of the trouble, and is somewhat dependent on the mentality of the patient. There are many people who would only be confused by being forced into a study of mental phenomena. Not being students, they would be more bewildered than helped by the details of their inner mechanisms. Others, of studious habits and inquiring minds, are encouraged to browse at will in a library of psychotherapy and to learn all that they can from the best authorities. ”

“ Thus in recent decades the thorough work of scientific physicians has developed a psychotherapy of considerable extent and of indubitable usefulness, far removed from the simultaneous efforts of the churches and of the popular mental healing cures. A number of eminent men in all countries have tested the methods and have published the results. ”

“ Even where the disease is quite imaginary, though that term has been so sadly abused that it is perhaps better to speak of affections as purely mental in origin, psychotherapy is important. As has been well said, a patient not having something physical the matter who thinks that there is something the matter, is in a worse state than one who really has something the matter. There are a great many such cases. If the principles of psychotherapy can relieve them and cure many of them, then it has a large place in human life. ”

“ Yet before we analyze some typical symptoms, it might be wise to review the whole series of means and tools which the psychotherapist finds at his disposal. [Pg 184]
VIII
THE GENERAL METHODS OF PSYCHOTHERAPYContents
The psychological work of the physician does not begin with his curative efforts. Therapy is always only the last step. Diagnosis and observation have to precede, and an inquiry into the causes of the disease is essential, and in every one of these steps psychology may play its rôle. The means of psychodiagnostic are not less manifold than those of psychotherapy. ”

“ There is probably nothing more valuable in the ordinary application of psychotherapy than these various auxiliaries, with their power to remove disturbing factors, while, on the other hand, nothing aids more in bringing relief for many conditions than the removal of certain disturbing factors. ”