Brief therapy. Lasting impressions. What is psychotherapy?

Description

What is Psychotherapy? Life is dialogue. It begins with the newborn's cry and the mother's response to it. The cessation of dialogue is death. Psychotherapy is a moral, linguistic, and political enterprise. Medical therapy is a materialist, rational-scientific, remedial enterprise. Modern science led to the divorce of medical healing from faith healing. Psychotherapy as dialogic engagement leads to its divorce from medical treatment. A critic may assert that prayer does not "work," meaning that it fails to cure lung cancer or pneumonia, without implying - much less asserting - that there is no God. He thus avoids being categorized and calumniated as an atheist. Similarly, a critic may assert that psychiatric drugs do not "work," meaning that they fail to cure depression or schizophrenia, without implying - much less asserting - that there is no mental illness. He thus avoids being categorized and calumniated as a know-nothing denying the reality of diseases of the mind. Educational objectives: 1. Present the case for rejecting the so-called "medical model" - actually, the pediatric model - of psychotherapy and its legal-social implications. 2. Present the case for an understanding of psychotherapy as a conversation between two equals rather than a cure of mental diseases.

Runtime

83 min

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Database

Alexander Street

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