ABSTRACT
Our usually laudable preference for direct and clear expression leads us to speak of our activities in psychotherapy by using transitive verbs, implicitly analogizing psychotherapy to the procedures of allopathic medicine. One of the serious errors that we invite by this mode of expression is to think that psychotherapy is something the therapist does to the patient, just as surgery is something a surgeon does to the patient. In common usage, we speak of “interpreting a symptom,” we “analyze a neurosis,” we “reassure the patient.”
