ABSTRACT
Therapeutic abuse can be said to occur to the extent that an artificial framework is created in which, at the margin, infantilized patients can be thought unable to take responsibility for their own choices or behaviour. "Rosie Alexander" has expressed something similar: Many people have the same kind of experience in therapy, principally the invasion of one's emotional space to the exclusion of all else and the suffering of unrequited desire to an incapacitating degree. Joel Kovel has aptly written that "To state the limits of therapy is also to recognise that the human situation has no closed end, but is rather in a state of continuous historical evolution". It is interesting to reflect on the way in which, when therapy is seen not to work, it is almost invariably "blamed" on therapists, rather than the whole project of therapy being called into question.
