The current financial crisis makes apparent that the neo-liberal project has reached its limits. The reorganization of countless sectors in society, including mental healthcare, was executed within the paradigm of this project. Its demise looming, it is time to rethink our view on humanity, organization and society.
This paper examines a tendency that is becoming more and perceptible, and entails that psychotherapy is being legitimized in economical terms, by looking at it as a product. It describes how society, from the sixties on, became dominated by an economic take on humanity, characterized by a high degree of individual freedom as well as growing external control, in which human relationships became increasingly defined in a consumer-production pattern. Psychotherapists, caught in the same timeframe, also tend to describe their activities in those terms. But does that not jeopardize a core value – to encounter the client as a human being in his or her own right?
legitimizing psychotherapy, economic definition of humanity, DBC, cultural philosophic approach of relations in healthcare
The tPeP (Journal Person-centered experiential Psychotherapy) is the scientific journal for Dutch and Flemish psychotherapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, that work from, or are interested in a client-centered perspective.
