Psychotherapy Today

Not Your Grandfather’s Psychoanalysis

by Lorrie Klosterman and illustrations by Annie Internicola, January 31, 2011

When several life issues turned truculent in my early thirties, I took a friend’s advice and sought a psychotherapist. To this day (many years later) I am still immensely grateful and in awe of the patient, wise, and compassionate therapeutic angels who helped me evolve a healthy way of looking at, and feeling about, my life and my deepest self. And while it is impossible to do justice here to the field of psychotherapy, I want to offer a few morsels about its basics and peek into what a few practitioners in our region are up to.

Psychotherapy is not just for those with serious mental illness: Many people need help with issues that are interfering with life’s activities. “Often, the people I see are having trouble with a relationship—a marriage or partnership, with children, with a boss, with a landlord,” says psychotherapist Bob Hausman, MA, director of the Woodstock Therapy Center and current president of the Hudson Valley Guild of Mental Health Professionals. Other reasons to seek psychotherapy include depression or anxiety (from mild to severe), phobias, trauma and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), dealing with a change in family structure, problems at school or work, or conflict among peers.

Increasingly, people also want help feeling fulfilled: to find balance among the demands and desires of life, to gain a deeper understanding of themselves, to empower and enrich their dreams. It may be distress that initially leads them to a first appointment, but the discovery process from then on is often life changing.

Foundations and Diversity
A basic definition of psychotherapy, Hausman offers, is “a conversation between two people that is about one of them, the client. This is distinguished from a friendship, where presumably there is a reciprocal caring and balanced sharing. Having said that, from my point of view and that of many other therapists, the curative or ameliorative aspect of what happens is about the relationship between client and therapist.”

Hausman cites a famous phrase of eminent psychologist Carl Rogers, whose perspective and research underlie the approach of many psychotherapists today: “The therapist has unconditional positive regard for the client.”  That manifests as a nonjudgmental and supportive presence from the therapist. “In that sense the helping part of it is about readjusting the client’s perception of themselves,” says Hausman, “which is a much more active approach and a major step forward from Freudian analysis, in which the analyst was supposed to be pretty much a blank screen and mostly listening.”