Forum

(06/15/2016) ✕

Share:

Psychotherapies always include an examination of a suffering person, a suffering subject. On how they think about the subject, psychotherapeutic approaches differ. The author contrasts a purposive-rational with a tragic self-understanding. The first he identifies with the behavioral therapy, the second he locates in psychoanalysis, even if it contains a contradictory subject understanding. In contrast to the purposive-rational self-understanding, which defines the subject on self-mightiness and self-availability, the tragic self-understanding sees the subject as weaker, but sums it up further at the same time. Where the behavioral therapy must separate the patient of its failure, the tragic self-understanding admits to the patient, to secretly pursue in its failure also a subversive intention and to respond to otherwise suppressed truths. The author observes a disappearance of the tragic self-understanding in recent psychodynamic approaches and outlines how a re-orientation of the tragic self-understanding could bring among other the expression in the socialization of psychotherapists.


The strong subject in modern behavioral therapy

In modern (cognitive) behavioral therapy, the patient appears to be well presented as a strong subject. It is his right to self-control in rational goals, self-availability and even self-mightiness, from which it emanates.

"The presumption of a concept of man: leitmotif... is the pursuit of self-determination, self-responsibility, self-control." (P.4, Kanfer, Reinecker u Schmelzer., 1990)
...