Psychotherapy as an Autonomous Profession – The Great Idea of the European Association for Psychotherapy

Abstract

Psychotherapy has been facing a series of problems from its very beginning; how to define it, how to delimit it from other forms of help, how to establish its scientific status, what other professions should be entrusted to; what bases of understanding of the human being should it be founded on, etc. Different psychotherapeutic methods although they might be consistent within themselves offer a variety of answers though often contradictory ones to the above dilemmas as well as how should an encounter – where one human being helps another one – actually look like. All these answers, saturated with epistemic, ontological and final beliefs, cause intolerance thus obstructing a great deal of further progress of indispensable diversity on the level of the actual help. — In order to surpass this we need two: a formal framework and our personal effort. First is represented by the European Association for Psychotherapy. The Strasbourg Declaration on Psychotherapy (1990) as a scientific discipline and an independent profession as well as speaking in favour of the multiplicity of the methods, has actually offered the framework we have needed. On personal level, however, each of us may give his contribution to surmount the obstacles in our mutual interactions by revealing his own personal and professional identity, accepting the identity of others and thus making the dialog possible.