ABSTRACT
When I was doing a post-doctorate course at the New York Psychiatric Institute in New York, I learned a valuable lesson about success and failure from the medical students on the programme. They were very careful about using the words success and failure because medicine, like psychotherapy, is a tricky business. The human organism is too complex to offer simple generalisations about how things work. Instead, they would quote what was apparently an old saying in medical education: “I supply the treatment. God supplies the cure.” I take this to mean for psychotherapy that there are unknowables in treating mental pain through the talking cure. But I do think we can make some approximate judgements about who we think we have helped in psychotherapy, specifically whether the client has done the work on themselves that needed to be done.
