Leamington Spa, United Kingdom

Counselling and Psychotherapy

Table of contents

Counselling and Psychotherapy at Warwickshire College

Language: English Studies in English
Subject area: economy and administration
University website: www.wcg.ac.uk
Foundation of Sciences (FdSc)

Definitions and quotes

Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy is the use of psychological methods, particularly when based on regular personal interaction, to help a person change behavior and overcome problems in desired ways. Psychotherapy aims to improve an individual's well-being and mental health, to resolve or mitigate troublesome behaviors, beliefs, compulsions, thoughts, or emotions, and to improve relationships and social skills. Certain psychotherapies are considered evidence-based for treating some diagnosed mental disorders. Others have been criticized as pseudoscience.
Psychotherapy
Whenever the therapist stands with society, he will interpret his work as adjusting the individual and coaxing his 'unconscious drives' into social respectability. But such 'official psychotherapy' lacks integrity and becomes the obedient tool of armies, bureaucracies, churches, corporations, and all agencies that require individual brainwashing. On the other hand, the therapist who is really interested in helping the individual is forced into social criticism. This does not mean that he has to engage directly in political revolution; it means that he has to help the individual in liberating himself from various forms of social conditioning, which includes liberation from hating this conditioning — hatred being a form of bondage to its object.
Alan Watts, Psychotherapy, East and West (1961), p. 8
Psychotherapy
She listened for the pain in my words, not to the narrative itself. She was intuiting what it meant to me, what was most important, what, in that confused mass of experience and yearning she heard in my voice, she could single out to give back.
Alice Sebold, Lucky, Alice Sebold, 30 September 2009, p. 106
Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy may begin with the primitive, but it must end with the divine, for both are integral factors in the human mind.
Violet M. Firth, (Dion Fortune) (1922), The Machinery of the Mind. p. 98
Privacy Policy