Reflections on “In Treatment”
In Therapy, Is the Customer Ever Right?
Season 1, Episode 2
There’s a joke among therapists that the customer (client, patient, consumer) is never right. Sorry, it’s not a very good joke. Actually, only therapists of psychodynamic schools of therapy tell that joke, the Freudians, Jungians, Adlerians, Kleinians, Bernians, and Lacanians among us. Cognitive Behavioral Therapists might chuckle, too; as would any garden variety addiction counselor. But no other kind of psychotherapist would ever think the joke was funny.
The point of the joke is that people kid themselves, they practice denial, and throw up their defenses against knowing the truth. It’s the therapist’s job to get past those defenses and show the client what he should have been seeing all along. The goal of therapy, to a psychodynamic counselor, is insight. They want you to be able to see clearly, and they assume, when you come to their office, that you are not.
The variety of therapist least likely to enjoy the joke would be the person-centered kind. They believe the client is always right when they are fully themselves. That is to say, they are not right all the time, but given enough empathy, sincerity, and acceptance, they will eventually come around to declare the truth. Maybe a person-centered therapist would…
