ABSTRACT
Therapists may be therapeutic to the extent that they can help people identify the powers and resources needed to tackle their difficulties and encourage them where possible to acquire them. There can be few practitioners of counselling or psychotherapy who have not witnessed what often seem to be the almost miraculous therapeutic powers of the ‘therapeutic relationship’ itself. Received psychotherapeutic wisdom eschews ‘dependency’ and warns solemnly against creating it in patients; it even assumes a distinctly moralistic tone in disapproving of ‘dependency’ as an altogether undesirable trait in adult human beings. Priests, doctors and therapists have no doubt all in their different ways contributed to the professional mystification of comfort-giving, but there is really no secret about it. The wizardry of the therapist consists in his or her being able to penetrate patients’ confusion in order to reveal to them the ‘real’ reasons for their distress.
