A series of sessions to «clean consciousness leads to a new level of freedom for the patients to use their mental powers and to changes in their way of life.
Diagnostic phase
Patients first come to the doctor, not always knowing what to start with. One thing is obvious to them: they feel bad. What is this «bad about? How great are the number of the ways to further communication between two people, one of whom is a doctor and the other the patient? This choice of paths depends a lot on the doctors viewpoint.
Thetherapists viewpoint
Ive slipped away from Aesculapius
Lets consider what usually happens when a person turns to the classic doctor. What are you complaining about? The complaints are recounted. Anamnestic data is collected. Then an objective examination is carried out: percussion, auscultation, palpation, followed by instrumental and laboratory studies. The sum of the data allows evaluation of the state of certain organs and to put forward diagnostic hypotheses. Differential diagnosis involves the selection of the most likely conclusions from the list of possibilities. In the future, the diagnosis will be refined using ex juvantibus, which is a process of making an inference about disease causation from an observed response of the disease to a treatment. The activity of the doctor at the same time is quite large. The patient is enjoined to be obedient, to bravely endure all the hardships of service.
Thus, the diagnostician in this relationship is a doctor. Their research tool is their «clinical apparatus together with devices that are extensions of their senses. Their direction of examination is the state of organs and systems. The position of the patients is to endure everything, as it is all about their functional status (patient is in Latin «patient).
Psychiatrists still maintain the impartial study of the psychopathological phenomena, the definition of symptoms, syndromes and «nosology class of the disease.
«Well-collected anamnesis is half the diagnosis» these traditions are inherited by clinical psychotherapy. On one hand, allowing the participation of the patients personality in determining their fate, but, on the other, not overestimating the role of psychological factors in the formation of the patients condition. (Excessive psychologization is referred to as false psychology). Clinical psychotherapy is interested in the peculiarities of the constitutional and genetic type of a patient. A therapist plays the role of a mentor or a teacher: «a patients job is to be ill and a therapists job is to study their illness and to prescribe proper medical procedures.
Healers without any medical training copy the expert in a parodical way. They know everything for their client, they will tell him everything: what was, what is, what will be, who «did it to him. Their main instrument is their intuition. They are ready to answer almost all questions, as well as cure all diseases
There is a clear difference between the content of professional and non-professional approaches, but they do have one thing in common. They give the patient the role of a mute participant. (By the way, not all applicants for help reject such a passive role. Among the clients there are a lot of undisguised supporters of such a position.)
The directive position of the doctor in relation to the patient was especially present in the initial stages of the formation of psychotherapy. Charcot and his school, Pierre Jean, French doctors Lebo and Bernheim were the researchers of the phenomena of suggestion. August Forel from Switzerland did a lot in the study of somnambulism and the phenomena of hysteria, followed by the discovery of the origins of affective symptoms, particularly hysteria by Breuer and Freud. However, their methods also suggested a greater activity of the doctor.
Dialectical method
Laying the foundations of psychological psychotherapy, Freud made a remarkable move towards greater interaction with the patient in the identification, interpretation and subsequent processing of their condition. However, there were remnants of the old hypnotic period of development of psychotherapy: the patient passively lay on the couch, the analyst was separated from them.
Jung was much more inclined to the dialectical method. «If I, as a psychotherapist, feel an authority towards the patient and, in accordance with this, claim to know something about their personality and be able to make the right conclusions about it, then I, thereby, sign my own non-criticality, because I find myself untenable in assessing the person opposing me.9»
Here is his description of the features of the «dialectical mode of action, i.e. the position avoiding any methods:
«The therapist is no longer an active subject, but a witness of the individual development process. () The analyst here is not a superior, competent, judge and advisor, but a participant in the dialectical process as well as (now) the so-called patient. () In the relations «doctor-patient, two mental systems are mutually correlated, and therefore any sufficiently deep penetration into the psychotherapeutic process will inevitably lead to the conclusion that due to the individual originality of the participants, the «doctor-patient attitude should be a dialectical process. () It is clear that more complex, spiritually higher standing natures cannot be helped with complacent advice, suggestions and attempts to appeal to a particular system. In such cases, the doctor is better to remove the armor of methods and theories and rely only on the fact that his personality is strong enough to serve the patient as a point of reference and support. At the same time, it is necessary to seriously weigh the probability that the patients personality may surpass the doctor in mind, spirituality, breadth and depth in all such cases, the doctor should leave open the individual path of healing, and then the healing will not lead to a change in personality, but will coincide with the process of individuation, i.e. the patient will become who is in essence10».
On the North American continent, Carl Rogers and other humanist psychologists have proclaimed confidence in the clients own abilities for personal growth.
Significant development of this principle is in the NLP, offering to refrain from meaningful instructions and limited only to formal.
Following the clients process is a fundamental principle of process-oriented psychology.
The risk of affirmations
Reflecting on the danger of affirmations, and even more on suggestion (in particular, in the process of psychoanalysis), V. T. Kondrashenko and D. I. Donskoy note: There are certain difficulties in the use of suggestion. One of them is that the patient gets used to this regressive form of support and uses it as a prosthesis. The second difficulty arises if the suggestion is used without its subsequent realization. In this case, the suggestion of the analyst is not analyzed and, as a result, the patient may develop a new neurotic symptom complex. Most often this happens when the interpretation is presented to the patient as a dogma.11
Thus, suggestion, struggling with one complex, can give rise to another.