What is Psychotherapy?

Concepts and theories of what the "psyche" is, how it becomes disturbed, and how it can be brought back into harmony, are as old as humanity.

The CTP keeps an open mind on what psychotherapy is. In this web site we have included a brief but extensive overview of what various thinkers over the centuries have contributed to our understanding of psychotherapy.

Frequently Asked Questions

At CTP we train to do individual therapy.

This means that the therapist and client meet once or twice a week in a private office for about an hour. Usually they sit opposite each other and begin a conversation about the client’s life and self-defined emotional difficulties.

Clients often come with very specific emotional difficulties, but often too with a larger purpose of understanding themselves better, of finding their true self, of freeing up energy for living more fully.

This takes time, sometimes months, often years. We speak of clients “doing their work”, that is, the work of their own psychotherapy.

You see how clearly this differentiates us from modern psychiatry with its desire to respond to all psychological problems with a specific medication. For them, after diagnosis and prescription, further meetings are mostly for monitoring medication.

The roots of our kind of psychotherapy are more clearly seen in the Greek “Know thyself”, and in the Judaeo-Christian idea of a spiritual (moral) life, than in physical medicine.

Our clients are invited to enter upon a human journey with a therapist who is on the same journey. We assume an essential equality of persons in this work and in this dialogue.

You can see how uneasily this kind of psychotherapy fits into the culture of medical insurance with its reliance on expert knowledge and its insistance on quick solution of “problems”. “How many sessions will you need to cure this patient?”

Why do we require eighty hours of therapy before beginning the program?

Could you imagine it being a prerequisite for training as a psychiatrist that you should have been on some form of psychiatric medication before you begin?

Clearly we see the psychotherapy prerequisite differently. We don’t see it as a sign that you were crazy, but that you have begun your own journey of self understanding.

It was early a requirement for psychoanalysts that they do their own analysis before they begin practicing. This came to be called a training analysis. We are broadly in this tradition, asking our students to have done a significant therapy before beginning the program, and then asking them to stay in therapy for the time they study with us.

This tends to emphasize our sense that psychotherapy is good for pretty well everyone and constitutes a kind of “literacy” in our culture.

Why do we study all those authors?

Well first, there is no consensus out there about human psychology or what psychotherapy is, so we follow an eclectic but selective historical sequence of “classic” texts and representatives of the recent forms of psychodynamic thinking.

“Selective” implies that we fairly root ourselves in Freud and what followed organically from him or in fruitful reaction to him (for example, Jung). It also marks the fact that every author studied is considered really worth reading by some member of the faculty.

“Eclectic” implies that we are not a school dedicated to one form of psychodynamic theory. The original faculty (some of whom are still around) differed quite widely in psychodynamic theory and practice, but everyone wanted many views to be offered in the school.

We also decided to offer paths of concentration so that students could choose after the first two years to concentrate on a particular form of psychodynamic theory.

So a student might end up training to work as a self-psychology therapist or an object relations therapist. They will of course seek out appropriate supervisors.

Why must students be in a psychotherapy training group for four years?

We have found this an absolutely invaluable preparation for working as a therapist. The student is invited to deepen and amplify their individual therapy through honest interaction with others. The faculty is able to see whether students have the sensitivity and sturdiness to take each other in and enter into real dialogue.

It is not that we want them to practice being therapists, but to practice being as fully human and open as you need to be to be a competent therapist.

So a student’s capacity and readiness to begin working as a therapist is best seen from how they do in the group.

Won’t this kind of evaluation destroy the therapeutic possibility of the group?

Ideally, we would separate evaluation from anything designed to be a form of therapy.

And in fact, we insulate individual therapy of the student from all aspects of evaluation. If the student is a client of a faculty member, that faculty member absents themself from all evaluations of that student. Nor is any outside therapist asked to report on their client.

However we need some deeper access to a student’s readiness and ability than is given by academic competence. More specifically, we need to be convinced of a student’s emotional maturity: their capacity to take in others in a steady way, their ability to handle their own emotional troubles, their readiness to enter into the emotionally intimate work of supervision.

So we ask our students to bear the tension of throwing themselves fully into the groups, even though the group therapists will be later asked to evaluate their readiness to work.

Why do we wait so long before students begin to work?

1) Some training programs follow an apprenticeship model, putting people to work under supervision from the beginning. You will find, however, that most of these are graduate programs. That is, they presuppose a degree in medicine, psychology, social work or the like.

We made a choice from the beginning not to require a university degree as prerequisite, for two reasons.

First, most university degree programs are quite poor preparation for psychodynamic therapy. So we preferred to design a program ourselves, hoping also that its standard of excellence would be comparable to university level.

Secondly, we wanted our school to be open to people of mature life experience who may not have been to university. Our school has therefore been especially attractive to women who did not complete university but found themselves in their mature years eager to work as psychotherapists.

2) Those programs that get people working right away are usually not asking the student to take responsibility for a long therapy with a client. In psychiatry and social work the interventions are usually short term.

When one of our students begins to work they assure the client that they are committed to a full therapy with them, even beyond graduation. In other words, the student is taking on the same commitment to their client that a practicing psychotherapist does.

So we require three or four years of preparation for taking on this large responsibility.