What is psychotherapy?

Most who use that term say it is a talking cure for mental illness. This is the certainly the common understanding in the profession and with associated organizations. But just because it is common, does not make it the only or the best possible definition.

For years some of us have spoken of “spiritually-integrated psychotherapy,” accepting that common understanding of psychotherapy, but seeing a spiritual component to accompany the usual triumvirate of behavior, cognition, emotion as component parts of “mental health.” This “triumvirate” has never seemed adequate to me, just as the terms “mental health” and “mental illness” have seemed inadequate. 

There are many others whose views are that the medical model of “mental illness” is only sustainable if there is an organic cause that can be demonstrated through biologic testing by a pathologist. Otherwise it is simply a metaphor to allow psychiatry to label emotional distress as a medical disorder. A close look at the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the bible of the psychiatry industry, will demonstrate the faults of the medical model.

So if, perchance, the word “psychotherapy” has, at best, a scarred root, and if “mental illness” is to be reserved for brain pathology, perhaps there is another paradigm for which the word psychotherapy could be a referent.  I propose that there is.

Examining the word etymologically, it derives from Greek words for “spirit” and “cure” or “repair”. In particular the story of Psyche and Eros is instructive. There are various interpretations of the story but in essence, the following are the key points—that buttress my argument.

Eros is the son of Aphrodite, whose mischievous interventions in the affairs of gods and mortals cause bonds of love to form, often illicitly. (In other versions Eros is the fourth Primordial god and had no parents.)  Psyche is a mortal, human princess of astounding beauty who has gained the ire of Aphrodite as men turned their worship from the goddess to the girl.

In her jealousy, Aphrodite commands Eros to make Psyche fall in love with the most hideous man he could find. The story gets complicated by tasks of impossible difficulty and trips to the underworld, but the upshot is that Eros and Psyche fall in love and are married in the presence of the gods.

Here is the key point. As part of their marital bliss, Psyche bestows on Eros the one thing, the one gift that he, as a god, is lacking, the human spirit. Zeus (The one who rules all of Olympus, all of the gods.) is so pleased by this that he decides to give to both Psyche and Eros, the gift of immortality—as a wedding present.

In ancient Greek, the name of Psyche became the word for the human spirit. It is literally, the breath that is unique to the human spirit and is used as such in language and literature of the time.

It would appear then that a more adequate definition of “psychotherapy” is not the “cure of mental illness” but rather “the cure or repair of the human spirit, or soul.” It is no longer valid to speak of “spiritually-integrated psychotherapy.” All psychotherapy is spiritual, at least in this sense.

This helps distinguish psychotherapy from the use of psychology to reduce human beings to “normalcy,” to make them “fit in.” Psychotherapy as truly practiced is helping people to recognize and move toward their uniqueness; toward what makes them truly human; toward the health of the human spirit.

So often, people are in emotional pain and dysfunction. At the first level, it is important to aid such a person by being attentive to their struggle and difficulty, whether that is grief, fear, anxiety, depression or something else. But psychotherapy is called to go beyond that, to help the client recognize, pursue and grapple with her own uniqueness, her spirit--her unique “ground of being.”(The concept of “Ground of being” comes from the work of Paul Tillich in his The Courage to Be.)

Only by making spirituality the center of our endeavor, can we say that we are practicing psychotherapy.