Fitness for Community: A Response to Langs and Kohut

Abstract

Offers an appreciation and a critique of certain notions of the nature of psychotherapy as held by Robert Langs and Heinz Kohut, particularly as these psychoanalytically-oriented therapists view the preferred relationship between therapist and patient. Explores the following theoretical and clinical issues: (1) Appropriate point and visible commitments for client and therapist beyond the therapy contract; (2) technical and philosophical assumptions related to the prohibition against community membership of the therapist; (3) exclusiveness claim of the therapist as that of a mother who has but one child; and (4) the degree of omniscience of the therapist. These issues are addressed from a viewpoint which sees the pastoral psychotherapist as a representative of a wider community than that traditionally found in the psychotherapeutic approaches of psychoanalysis.