ABSTRACT
The helping process in psychiatry has two fundamental goals. It may concern itself with efforts either to modify the environmental stresses which have disrupted the individual’s psychic equilibrium, or else to improve the individual’s adaptive capacity to these stresses, or both. Psychotherapy may be defined simply as a method of modifying an individual’s symptoms, feelings, thought processes, or behavior by means of communication in an interpersonal relationship. The major assumption concerning the psychotherapeutic process has been that it is based primarily upon the insight that is acquired by the patient. In a very fundamental sense, the heart of psychiatric practice will always be the psychotherapeutic process.
