| Summary: | 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.
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