Goals in Therapy

The single, all-encompassing goal of psychotherapy is cure. But, what is a cure in psychotherapy? In confronting this challenge, we must be concerned with several questions: the multiple meanings of the term “cure”; the relations of cure to our changing conception of emotional illness; partial cure, complete cure, the quality of cure; the proof of cure, the relations of cure to the specific illness and person being treated; and finally, the relations of cure to the nature of the curing process itself—the dynamics of the psychotherapeutic relationship.

At the present stage, it is safe to assume that standards for cure, the relations of cure to illness and to the curing process, are by no means uniform. In these respects, there are in our day wide divergences of orientation as between the various schools of psychotherapy, and among individual therapists themselves. In one sense, it ought to come as no surprise that each therapist evolves a relatively personal set of criteria for the goals of therapy and the signs of cure. From one point of view, this perhaps will always be the case; from another, it reflects a present state of affairs which is by no means ideal. In so far as psychotherapy is a healing art, which expresses the therapist's unique use of his personal talents in the curative role, there must always be