Psychotherapy: A short overview

Abstract

The paper presents an outline of psychotherapy as a complex of socio-cultural phenomena, consisting of two levels or aspects: psychotherapy as a form of professional activity and psychotherapy as a science. We take into account both the internal relations between the levels and their external connections to various scientifc and practical subfelds of psychology and medicine. A crucial marker of psychotherapy as professional activity involves the use of four main principles of psychological infuence: suggestion, explanation, conditioning, and abreaction — as caregiving. It is proposed that the development of psychotherapy may be divided into three main stages: the pre-conceptual, from the middle of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century; the stage of formation of the main psychotherapeutic traditions, from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of the 1940s; and the stage of the expansion of psychotherapeutic approaches to non-medical areas of social practice and care, such as counseling, coaching etc. Special attention was also paid to the development of views on the contingent of psychotherapeutic care recipients and its infuence on the development of psychotherapeutic theory. Conceptual development of psychotherapy is viewed as a systematic expansion from specifc clinical interests to a broad feld of psychological, philosophical etc. conceptualization under the infuence of changing social requests in the 20th century.