Chapter Twelve—
12. Psychotherapy
Thinking and Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy is the treatment of mental disorders by psychological means.
As I propose to make clear, psychotherapy is properly to be conceived as a process of education through which the
patient is (a) led to understand the deficiencies in his method of thinking, and the errors in his values and premises,
that underlie his problems; and (b) taught how to improve the efficacy of his thinking processes, and to replace
irrational values and premises with rational ones.
When interviewing a new patient, it is my policy to tell him the following, in effect: "I see psychotherapy as
involving three elements or forces. There is I, the psychotherapist. There is the 'you' who has a psychological
problem. There is the 'you' who is rational enough to recognize the existence of the problem and to want to conquer
it. Psychotherapy is an alliance of the therapist with the rational 'you'—against the 'you' who has the problem."
Thus the patient is required to maintain a highly active role in the process of his own treatment; he is required to
become, in effect, a co-psychotherapist. He is not indulged in the delusion that he can be cured while maintaining
an attitude of mental passivity (the same passivity, in most cases, that was a crucial cause of his neurosis).
For the patient to take a usefully active part in the process of his own treatment, it is often necessary that, on the
road to self-understanding and self-improvement, he be taught a good deal about psychology—about how the mind
functions, about the