ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines those forms of professional help which are most widely available to those who seek it when they feel in need of a degree of repair which they cannot effect for themselves. For the most part, the people in mind may be experiencing quite acute distress, in which 'anxiety' and 'depression' both feature to some extent, perhaps taking a particular kind of form, or seeming to them to indicate some kind of – perhaps serious – physical illness. In the public mind 'psychotherapy' is often synonymous with psychoanalysis. There are undoubtedly very many people so embedded in this perspective that they would consider it barely sane to question it – it seems to them simply self-evident that the kinds of 'symptoms' which those in distress display just must be due to specific causes which can at least in principle be understood and eradicated by technical experts.
