On the Uses & Abuses of Therapy

As therapy sees it, the chief difficulty is not to identify someone’s problem but to help them see, feel, and accept it. Were the truth to be baldly laid out before most clients, they would leave at once in a mood of incensed fury

We enter therapy and discuss our past. We formulate opinions about what happened. We create a rich, detailed world. In therapy or on our own, we focus our attention on something that no longer exists in order to understand or have perspective or acknowledge or own what has happened. And only after we decide this understanding or recognition has tak

“Insight is the booby prize of therapy” is my favorite maxim of the trade, meaning that you can have all the insight in the world, but if you don’t change when you’re out in the world, the insight—and the therapy—is worthless. Insight allows you to ask yourself, Is this something that’s being done to me or am I doing it to myself? The answer gives

As an analyst, I know that therapy can help solve problems, but it can also have the unintended consequence of perpetuating a person’s idea that there is something basically wrong with him