ABSTRACT
As a trainee psychotherapist, there are things to be learned from theory and things to be learned from practice—that is, from the actual experience of seeing patients. Thus, one begins in the dark, but through learning with the patient one succeeds in actually understanding the person who has come to seek help and what it is that he or she is actually looking for. In the process, one also learns how to be a therapist. As a psychiatrist, the author was no stranger to the concept of severity in psychiatric medicine, which has a well-established system and lexicon. There are common mental disorders, as distinct from serious mental illness; there are mild versus moderate versus severe disorders, each with clear descriptive and phenomenological correlates. As a psychotherapist, the author learned to become more available, to tune in to the subtleties of the patient's internal world which were mostly hidden from plain sight.
