the goal of therapy

‘The goal of therapy is to help the patient go beyond intellectualisation and rationalisation and other restrictive maneuvers to the point where she can move into unchartered territories to seek and find the anguish and terror of total realisation and discover that she can survive.

To know that life can be truly absurd and capricious; that one is not omnipotent; that without magic as the ultimate defense, there is pain at times which hurts more than words can describe.

And after the grief and the mourning, not only for the lost objects of one’s fantasies, but for the fantasies and illusions themselves, to be able to live relatively without illusion.

To know Time as a friend as well as an enemy. To recognise that happiness is not a condition, but an ephemeral and precious experience, that if one lives without illusion one must impart meaning to one’s life; that hope must replace expectations and demands; that activity must replace passivity; that realistic hope must be directed towards the expansion and growth of one’s potentialities, which implies experiencing more richly both sorrow and joy’  Fred Hahn in ‘On Magic and Change’, in Voices, October 1975.