- Topic Areas:
- Invited Address
- Category:
- Evolution of Psychotherapy | Evolution of Psychotherapy 1995
- Faculty:
- Thomas Szasz, MD | Paul Watzlawick, PhD
- Duration:
- 1:24:29
- Format:
- Audio Only
- Original Program Date :
- Dec 13, 1995
Description
Description:
Invited Address Session 2 Part 2 from the Evolution of Psychotherapy 1995 – The Healing Word: Its Past, Present and Future
Featuring Thomas Szasz, MD, with discussant Paul Watzlawick, PhD.
Moderated by Michael Munion, MA.
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.
Educational Objectives:
- To demonstrate that psychotherapy ought to be viewed as a moral-religious, rather than as a medical-therapeutic, enterprise.
- To demonstrate that the thesis that psychotherapy is inherently ineffective, as often advanced by critics, is logically incoherent.
- Given a client, articulate the impact of the economic context in which psychotherapy takes place on the ”therapeutic” character of the enterprise itself.
*Sessions may be edited for content and to preserve confidentiality*
