Psychotherapy and emancipation
Psychotherapy and emancipation

Summary/Abstract: In the article I ask the question about the place of an emancipatory task within various forms of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, where conversations with the patient play an important role. This task arises on discovering that an important source of the patient’s problems are views inherited from cultural traditions, ones which inhibit a proper assessment of various traumatic situations from the past and the forms of dependence on others. Then psychotherapists and psychoanalysts are inevitably faced with the task of making the patient aware of these limitations and forms of dependence, for only then is therapeutic progress possible. I provide three characteristic examples of similar cases from Polish psychiatric tradition, in which we can speak of a similarly binding role of cultural tradition in the process of therapy. I point out that the difficult situation the therapist then finds themselves in lies in the fact that, on the one hand, they have to depart from the postulate of maintaining world-view neutrality in their approach to the patient while, on the other hand, they cannot directly impose their own position on the patient. The therapist has to find a third, middle way between these two attitudes, one which requires great sensitivity in any approaches to the patient.

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