Persuasion and Healing: A Comparative Study of Psychotherapy Jerome Franck Julia Franck

Characteristics of Psychotherapy healing agent, trained in socially sanctioned method of healing believed to be effective by suffer and social group. a sufferer who seeks relief from the healer a healing relationship with series of contacts between healer and suffer

Historical Psychotherapies religio-magical - cause of illness supernatural or magical event, possession by evil spirit, or curse; rhetorical - for example, epics drama, philosophy; use of words to form attitudes, induce actions; empirical or naturalistic - natural events that could be studied empirically.

Different schools of psychotherapy focus in emotions, cognition, or behavior. Those seeking psychotherapy: demoralized - deprived of spirit, courage, disheartened, confused, powerless, unable to cope. Psychotherapies share 4 effective features:

1.An emotionally charged, confiding relationship with a helping person. Successful patients rated the personal interaction with therapist as the single most important part of their treatment. Depend on therapists for help because they believe the person ins competent, genuinely cares, and has no ulterior motives 2.A healing setting: Encounters are in special locales regarded as places of healing. Two therapeutic function: heighten the therapists prestige and strengthen patients expectation. Place to express feelings, reveal aspects of self which conceal from others.

3. A rationale, conceptual scheme, or myth - provides a plausible explanation for the patient's systems and prescribes a ritual or procedure for resolving them. - Theories resemble myths in two ways - imagination-catching formulations of important human experiences and difficult to prove empirically. - In US, faith in science provide predominate source of symbolic healing power. Some schools link to prestigious person - Skinner, Freud, etc. 4. A ritual or procedure - requires the active participation of both patient and therapist and that is believed by both to be the means of restoring the patients health. - Way to maintain alliance and transmit therapists influence and self- confidence.

The function of myth and ritual: Combat patient's sense of alienation and strengthens the therapeutic relationship. Shared belief system is essential to create strong bond. Inspiring and maintaining the patient's expectation of help. Keep them coming to therapy, moral builders, symptom relievers. Patient must link hope for improvement to specific processes of therapy and outcome. Providing new learning experiences: Therapist is the teacher who provides info. in an interpersonal context that enables patient to benefit from it. Experimental learning involves patients' emotions. New experiences can enhance moral by showing patients alternative ways of looking at themselves.

Arousing emotions: Important in three ways - 1. supplies motive power to undertake and endure suffering involved in attempts to change personal beliefs and behavior; 2. facilitates attitudinal change and enhance sensitivity to environmental influences; 3. may break up old patterns of personality integration and help build new ones. Encourage patients to reflect on implication of new experiences for their lives. Enhancing the patient’s sense of mastery or self-efficacy. - Self-esteem and security depend on sense of being able to understand and exert some control both over reactions of others toward oneself and over one's own inner states. Providing opportunities for practice: The function of myth and ritual:

Notes: 1. Colossal national appetite for mood-altering substances (prescriptions to illicit) suggests that blindness to the emotional and psychological dimensions of much somatic distress is a widespread cultural phenomena. 2. Failure to find differences in outcomes of different psychotherapies is partly methodological. However, it also suggests that features in common to all psychotherapies contribute more to their effectiveness than differences.

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