ABSTRACT
Psychotherapy has been around for as long as human beings have been engaged in serious conversation with each other; for essentially that is what psychotherapy is. It is a conversation between two individuals. Psychotherapy is predicated on the psychological value not simply of putting thoughts and feelings into words but of putting them into words that can make a psychological difference. In psychotherapy the intimacy of teller and listener and the protected eventfulness of language come together in the transference. Transference is the key to psychotherapeutic process and its life-blood. Strangely, mysteriously, the intimacy between the story-teller and story-listener in the clinical situation takes on many of the qualities of a real-life intimacy. It comes to constitute a real intimacy, albeit with an all-important therapeutic difference as well. To achieve this intimacy-with-a-difference, psychotherapy makes use of several features of the mental life.
