Derby, United Kingdom

Counselling and Psychotherapy Principles / Practices

Bachelor's
Language: EnglishStudies in English
Subject area: economy and administration
Qualification: BSc
Kind of studies: full-time studies, part-time studies
Bachelor of Science (BSc)
University website: www.derby.ac.uk
Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy is the use of psychological methods, particularly when based on regular personal interaction, to help a person change behavior and overcome problems in desired ways. Psychotherapy aims to improve an individual's well-being and mental health, to resolve or mitigate troublesome behaviors, beliefs, compulsions, thoughts, or emotions, and to improve relationships and social skills. Certain psychotherapies are considered evidence-based for treating some diagnosed mental disorders. Others have been criticized as pseudoscience.
Psychotherapy
I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts. The question "Why did you start using narcotics in the first place?" should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area.
William S. Burroughs, quoted in: Lois A. Michel (1968) Way out: a thematic reader. p. 121
Principles
I wish to establish some sort of system not guided by chance but by some sort of definite and exact principle.
Dmitri Mendeleev, Lecture to the Russian Chemical Society as quoted in "Peering Into the Unseen—What Is Revealed?" in Awake! magazine (22 August 2000).
Psychotherapy
Whenever the therapist stands with society, he will interpret his work as adjusting the individual and coaxing his 'unconscious drives' into social respectability. But such 'official psychotherapy' lacks integrity and becomes the obedient tool of armies, bureaucracies, churches, corporations, and all agencies that require individual brainwashing. On the other hand, the therapist who is really interested in helping the individual is forced into social criticism. This does not mean that he has to engage directly in political revolution; it means that he has to help the individual in liberating himself from various forms of social conditioning, which includes liberation from hating this conditioning — hatred being a form of bondage to its object.
Alan Watts, Psychotherapy, East and West (1961), p. 8
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