In the ancient world, the philosopher was a physician of the soul who, employing the healing word (iatroi /ogoi), offered counsel to persons perplexed by problems in living. After the triumph of Christianity, the priest as confessor-counselor replaced the philosopher as rhetorician of consolation. With the birth of psychiatry, and especially since the Freudian revolution, we call helping persons with words "psychotherapy." I shall try to show that without a decisive separation of rhetorical healing from medical healing, psychotherapy as the secular cure of souls is doomed to extinction.
Madanes will present guidelines for the positive use of shame in couples and families. Stories from therapy will be told to reveal complicated problems in which shame, sex, power and love are interconnected. Looking at extreme cases of violence will throw light on when it is appropriate to experience shame and how to recover from the pain that shame represents.
In the 1990's all factors of therapy are changing. The way of financing therapy is changing, there are new types of clientele, there are striking differences in ideology and the training of therapists is becoming a new kind of enterprise.
Methods for training therapists customarily are directed to developing cognitive abilities. Using Milton Erickson as a model, an alternate, experiential approach is offered. The "evoking style" of the therapist determines the outcome of the treatment more than the theoretical and clinical methods to which the therapist ascribes.
The evolution of psychotherapeutic methods over the past 200 years from Mesmer through the psychoanalytic schools, behaviorism and current cognitive psychology tells a fascinating tale of our evolving understanding of human nature. In this address we will trace the development of fundamental techniques such as suggestion, free association, active imagination, gestalt dialogue, focusing, Erickson's indirect approaches and what I now call "The Basic Accessing Question."
Cognitive therapy was originally developed for the treatment of Depression and Anxiety. Since its early beginnings various clinicians and investigators have extended its use to a wide variety of disorders and populations. Systematic outcome studies have demonstrated its efficacy not only in the garden variety of disorders such as Depression, Anxiety and Panic but also in medical disorders such a low back pain, diabetes, chronic fatigue syndrome and chronic hypertension.
Anyone can perform brief or short-term therapy, but unless pivotal issues are addressed, the treatment will, at best, be too narrow and restricted. It is essential to employ empirically established methods whenever possible, but also to have a framework and rationale for on-the-spot inventiveness. This Invited Address will explain how to be precise and targeted while also ensuring that interactive healing processes are put into effect.
The author traces the evolution of psychodynamic theory over the past fifty years and demonstrates how various individuals and schools of thought have contributed to increasing conceptual clarity despite significant continuing differences. Along with these theoretical advances, there have been important changes in analytically-oriented therapeutic techniques.
In the early decades of the 20th century Freud's mastery of the craft of presenting a case enthroned a belief that anxiety disorders were caused by repressed emotional complexes and that recovery required the restitution of repressed ideas. This belief dominated psychotherapeutic practice, and even though little was to be seen in the way of success, any alternative was treated with scorn. Mid-century studies of experimental neuroses showed that these disturbances were the consequence of the learning of maladaptive anxiety and could be overcome by systematic counteraction by other emotions.
The major emphasis in contemporary psychoanalytic psychotherapy is on the early and consistent interpretation of the transference. A growing attention to countertransference analysis, to the risk of "indoctrinating" patients, to character analysis, to the analysis of unconscious meanings in the "here and now" also are dominant trends. Significant controversies continue regarding the importance of the "real" relationship, the therapeutic versus the resistant aspects of regression, the role of empathy, and the relation of historical to narrative truth.