Psychotherapy

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Therapy involving discussion between therapist and client need not be organized by a doctor specializing in mental illness, and the client undergoing the therapy need not be mentally ill. He or she may just feel that there is something wrong with life and be seeking help, or someone who knows the person well may have recommended such a course of action. The person in charge of the therapy programme will not be a psychiatrist but a psychoanalyst or psychotherapist.

Many people find psychotherapy a very useful and rewarding step on their way to self-discovery. At the very least they have talked about things that they would never have dreamt of speaking about before and have learned to face up to them. They have been helped to come to terms with the past and have been able to achieve some understanding of how the past, with its suppressed fears and emotions, had affected the present and prevented them living life to the full. In a very real sense, many people discover who they really are through psychotherapy. Now they are ready to build a future.

There are some who see drawbacks in psychotherapy. The process of psychotherapy, as we have seen, aims to release blocked and negative emotions by getting clients to talk about things that had happened in their lives but had been subconsciously blocked out by them. Some sceptics are afraid that some of the psychotherapists' clients are talking not only about terrible things that had happened in their lives but about terrible things that had not happened at all but are the products of the clients' imagination.

This phenomenon, the existence of which is denied by many, is known as 'false memory'. Cited examples of it include people who suddenly claim that they were abused in some way, often sexually abused, when this seems highly unlikely in the light of evidence put forward by parents, other family members, neighbours, and so on. There are stories of parents being completely rejected by their grown-up children after therapy, when previously they had seemed to enjoy a very happy relationship-although it has to be borne in mind that only two people need to know the truth about abuse, onlookers being often ignorant of the truth.

Not enough is yet known about 'false memory', although the argument about it rages on. What is the case is that more and more people are turning to psychotherapy. People nowadays are considerably better informed, and they have a much better idea of when to seek help and where to find it. Many know the importance of being put in touch with themselves and with their own feelings, and many choose to do so by means of psychotherapy.