What is the Purpose of Psychotherapy?
To tolerate life remains, after all, the first duty of all living beings. Illusion becomes valueless if it makes this harder for us.
— Sigmund Freud
The psychotherapist is always listening. They listen to the stories people tell them; stories that double as half-truths they simultaneously tell themselves. Stories that the therapist may tell themselves just as often. Listening comes with the territory, and part of what makes someone a good therapist is the ability to do so. To an outside observer it might not look like much is going on between a client and a therapist. Just two people having a conversation, but beyond initial appearances, a complicated exchange is playing out between the client and the therapist.
It is only through facing the things in life that are most difficult and confusing for us that we make sense of them.
In a therapeutic dialogue both client and therapist are constantly testing one another, and constantly testing themselves. The client wants to know if someone the therapist, purported to be a professional helper, is really up to the task, which is a fair question because therapist do not always know. More than that, the therapist is not always sure of the client’s commitment either, and there is enough uncertainty and trepidation to make one ask, what is the purpose of all this psychological probing and is there an end goal to be reached once it’s all done?
It’s certainly a fact that people test one another, in therapy and in life, to find out whether or not it is safe enough, physically and psychologically, for them to be honest about who they truly are. and few situations engender this more than the unfamiliarity of finding oneself for the first time sitting on in a therapist’s office with the expectation that you simply open your mouth and start to share your thoughts and feelings with someone you just met. In order for anyone to do this, the therapist has to quickly convince the client of their skill and capability. Without this initial convincing, there is no reason for the client to be there, and their presence will certainly be short-lived. With it, the client feels safe enough for the work to begin.
What the client gains is a place to retreat from life when they need to. A place where they can get enough distance from the world to start learning about it—if you live long enough you know that it is difficult to be curious when you are being assailed on all sides by challenges, at which point surviving life’s harsh realities becomes the main goal, the only goal, and the lens through which all other choices are filtered. Therapists are there, one hour at a time, to pull the client out of their world, and more importantly, to pull out the parts of the client’s world that they struggle with the most. To push the client to confront the parts of life they are most confounded by.
It is only through facing the things in life that are most difficult and confusing that people begin to make sense of them. It is a process that must be repeated numerous times throughout their lives because new challenges require new answers regarding how they will be met and eventually overcome. In the end, there simply is no cure for life.
The psychotherapist acts, for some length of time, as a secular guide on the client’s journey, helping them learn how to confront their deepest anxieties and overcome their most stressful life events. Helping clients to become more skilled in the art of living is the psychotherapist’s purpose, and in carrying it out, clients themselves begin to develop their own, one that is not based on unearned confidence, but is carefully arrived at, with the proper motivation to pursue it.