ABSTRACT
Sullivan (1954) was one who found that getting the history straight was itself the treatment.
Thus, we try to proceed along the general lines of getting some notion of what stands in the way of successful living for the person, quite certain that if we can clear away the obstacles, everything else will take care of itself. So true is that, that in well over twenty-five years.… I have never found myself called upon to “cure” anybody. The patients took care ofthat, once I had done the necessary brush-clearing, and so on.…. The brute fact is that man is so extraordinarily adaptive that, given any chance of making a reasonably adequate analysis of the situation, he is quite likely to stumble into a series of experiments which will gradually approximate more successful living (pp. 238–239; emphasis added).
