Client testimonies help to specify what “harm” looks like in practice. Anna Sands, in Consuming Psychotherapy, foregrounds some interlocking dangers. First, it is that of denaturing people’s adaptive coping patterns without a good alternative. People muddle along, and most therapeutic clients are “the worried well”. Before starting therapy, Sands did not dwell on her problems and “got on with living”. But years of therapy eroded her vital instincts; she had made her very self an analytical object. The therapeutic frame, with its fixed times and fees, also reoriented her sense of what counted as real: “reality” became the carefully bounded space of therapy, while life outside was experienced as secondary. On this basis, she concludes, starkly, that “vulnerable people should not be exposed to psychotherapy,” because those most in need may not be resilient enough to withstand the strain it imposes.
In Shouldn’t I Be Feeling Better By Now?, an anthology of therapy harms by Yvonne Bates, Sylvia Wilde describes love for her therapist that “felt induced. Like being raped.” Rosie Alexander writes that ‘therapeutic neutrality’ can feel “chillingly impersonal”: “If a robot or a monkey were sitting in the chair, it would be just the same.” Sands notes the central paradox: “on the one hand, the overt aims are the creation of a more autonomous, critically perceptive person… On the other hand, most therapists expect unquestioning obedience to the laws of the therapeutic frame.” She became “abjectly dependent” on her second therapist, found her friendships wither, and concluded: “If therapy were a pill, I doubt it would be granted a licence. Its effects are too diverse and too unpredictable.”
Bates, herself a therapist, concedes in her introduction that “whilst therapy may help many clients, it is we, the therapists, who benefit the most. It enhances our self-confidence and sense of self-worth immeasurably.”
“The captain,” she adds, “does not want the boat to be rocked.”
Masson therefore asks: “We go to therapists expecting them to possess certain qualities: compassion, understanding, kindness, warmth, a sense of justice, integrity. But why should we believe that anybody possesses these qualities? Are they, after all, something that can be learned?” If what helps is largely non‑specific, then the professionalisation of kindness may itself be the central paradox, and perhaps the central harm, of psychotherapy.
Informed consent for these effects is variable. One review noted that “there is little empirical evidence on what psychotherapists’ attitudes towards informed consent” are in the field and how the process is effected. A small study of UK psychotherapy trainees found that some participants didn’t consider informed consent at all necessary. “Informed consent, um, to me it’s nothing”, one second-year trainee commented.
Informed consent for these effects is rare. Sands notes: “I was never warned what would happen to me. I was not warned how long it would take and how much it would cost.” Masson similarly asks how many clients know “that they may spend a great deal of money and not be helped” or that in anonymous surveys, “10 percent of male therapists admit to having had some kind of sexual contact with women clients.”
Ed Prideaux | Community Blogger at Chemical Collective
Ed is one of our community bloggers here at Chemical Collective. If you’re interested in joining our blogging team and getting paid to write about subjects you’re passionate about, please reach out to Sam via email at samwoolfe@gmail.com
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