What is psychotherapy – an art, for which one needs intuition, spontaneity and creativity, or a science with its rational grounding, logic explanations and steady evidence?
The answer to this question is different for the different methods and for the different authors, but every psychotherapeutic method should be scientifically based, and practicing it in any individual case is a piece of art.
Bulgarian Psychotherapy Association gives the following definition:
Practicing psychotherapy is a holistic and carefully planned treatment or therapeutic intervention, based on general and specialized training and knowledge (theoretical and practical) about psychopathology, disorders of the behaviour, states of confusion, or a more general need for emotional mental development and maturity of the personality, conected with psychosocial and psychosomatic factors and reasons. The practice of psychotherapy is performed with the help of scientific psychotherapeutic methods, in the interaction with one or more treated persons and one or more psychotherapists, with the aim to reduce or remove the established symptoms in order to achieve a change in the disorders of the behaviour and the attitudes, and for encouragement of the process of maturation, development, balance and wellbeing in the treated person.
Psychotherapy is a collective term that includes in itself a growing number of extremely diverse methods.
Psychotherapy in its primary conception was supposed to be treatment for patients with mental disorders. In the narrow clinical sense this term is used exactly as a method for treatment. With time passing, psychotherapeutic methods get a much broader application – to solve psychological problems and conflicts, for personal development and sophistication, for harmonization of the relationships in the family or the couple, to help educaion and pedagogics, to stimulate the spontaneity and creativity in the theatre and arts, to build teams and overcome problems of the organizationa psychology and management, to solve contradictions in the social area or anywhere, where there are human relationships.
Thus the term psychotherapy gets a broad meaning as a method to achieve a contracted desired change.
Psychotherapy in its clinical meaning is not only a way to deal with the symptom, but it rather includes a much broader spectrum of changes, leading to personal development.