GABRIELA OSORIO VILLASEÑOR PSY. D. WWW.PSICOTERAPIACATOLICA.COM 5 Conventional psychotherapy: high cost, long duration and atheism Beyond each case differences and specificities, the more or less valid indications to individual cases, all these approaches have three negative characteristics in common: high cost, long duration, and atheism. While in fact people have more or less free access (in Europe) to medical care through the various national health care systems (although dastardly neoliberal tendencies at work are tending to conform the European model to that of North America), mental health care is more often than not private and very expensive, thus accessible to few, with the result that distress, which is stronger in the working-class strata because of the difficult socioeconomic context, is often less well cared where it should be more widespread. There are famous Italian psychologists who charge 180 euros for not even a half-hour visit. The price obviously depends on the experience, expertise, and many years of study as well as the high demand for the professional's services (high demand and limited supply inevitably generate high prices), but this does not detract from the fact that such therapy may be accessible only to the lucky few. The vocation of helping people could therefore easily be overshadowed by purely economic interests. Generally then, the activation of one's internal resources for change, removal or acceptance of trauma aimed at gaining emotional stability, takes a long time with conventional techniques: the overall cost of therapy in the long run (cost of a single session times the number of sessions) thus soars. I often hear patients complaining that they have been in the psychologist's care for years with poor results. Instead, psychotherapy should be brief and essential: if the practitioner fails to make an impact in a reasonably limited number of sessions, then he or she should be changed because he or she has probably not found (and will never find) the right key to the problem. As for atheism, it is practically a given that a patient is unlikely ever to interact with a psychologist who proposes the Catholic faith, the root of our Western culture, as one of the pillars of his or her therapeutic approach, and works not only on the origin of trauma, self-discovery, self-potential and the search for change (a key concept in psychology), cognitive and behavioral patterns, but also on the spiritual, transcendent and eternal part of the person. This atheism has several causes, first and foremost the claim of perfect and absolute scientificity of psychology, which in fact is anything but an "exact" science as, for example, mathematics or physics are. And even if it were, science and faith are not necessarily incompatible, because for a great many scientists it is precisely the former that leads to the existence of God. Wilhelm Wundt, universally known as the father of psychology, introduced the experimental method into that discipline in the second half of the 19th century, paving the way for a scientific understanding of mental processes. But while the use of the experimental method gives the discipline a rigorous methodology of inquiry, distinguishing it from socalled "naive psychology," it never gives it the right and the presumption to call itself an exact science.
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