Psychotherapy Quotes

“When psychotherapy began, it was about the practitioner listening to a patient and interpreting what the patient said, in order to afford the patient insights about his or her psyche. But now we understand that the main curative part of psychotherapy is the relationship itself. It appears not to be relevant which psychology school the practitioner belongs to. What matters is the quality of the relationship and the practitioner's belief in what he or she is offering.”

“...two different kinds of Japanese psychotherapies, one based on getting people to stop using feelings as an excuse for their actions and the other based on getting people to practice gratitude.”

“The United States alone sports an inventive spectrum of psychotherapeutic sects and schools: Freudians, Jungians, Kleinians; narrative, interpersonal, transpersonal therapists; cognitive, behavioral, cognitive-behavioral practitioners; Kohutians Rogerians, Kernbergians; aficionados of control mastery, hypnotherapy, neurolingustic programming, eye movement desensitization- that list does not even complete the top twenty. The disparate doctrines of these proliferative, radiating divisions, often reach mutually exclusive conclusions about therapeutic propriety: talk about this, not that; answer questions, or don’t; sit facing the patient, next to the patient, behind the patient. Yet no approach has ever proven its method superior to any other. Strip away a therapist’s orientation, the journal he reads, the books on his shelves, the meetings he attends- the cognitive framework his rational mind demands – and what is left to define the psychotherapy he conducts?Himself. The person of the therapist is the converting catalyst, not his order or credo, not his spatial location in the room, not his exquisitely chosen words or denominational silences. So long as the rules of a therapeutic system do not hinder limbic transmission - a critical caveat - they remain inconsequential, neocortical distractions. The dispensable trappings of dogma may determine what a therapist thinks he is doing, what he talks about when he talks about therapy, but the agent of change is who he is. (186/7)”

“Psychotherapy isn't a twentieth-century artifice imposed on nature, but the reinstatement of a natural healing process.”

“No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions. I need both. It is an odd thing, owing life to pills, one's own quirks and tenacities, and this unique, strange, and ultimately profound relationship called psychotherapy”

“The four-letter word for psychotherapy is 'talk'.”

“Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion.”

“One of the terrible fallacies of contemporary psychotherapy is that if people would just say how they felt, a lot of problems could be solved. ”

“Catholic education and law schools provide me with a lot of miserable people as psychotherapy clients. I should be grateful. These people are looking for rescue from their education.”

“I think the future of psychotherapy and psychology is in the school system. We need to teach every child how to rarely seriously disturb himself or herself and how to overcome disturbance when it occurs.”