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WE ARE CONCERNED here with one facet of the process of psychoanalysis, with the functioning of the therapist. A motivation to help would seem a self-evident requirement, which is linked to the concept indicated, for example, in a recent Public Affairs pamphlet entitled, "Psychotherapy; a Helping Process." The various public images of the analyst, from cynical to sentimental, ranging from self-sacrificial magic helper, to someone grandiosely playing God, center around attributions concerning his motivation to help, and how he implements it. …
HELPING one another is as human a characteristic as are gregariousness and talking. It is this human trait of wishing to help people that is basic to the psychotherapist's intent to treat. The wish to help people is a legitimate motive for treating patients. Other than stating this assumption, this article will not go further into the motivation to help as such. It will instead treat of various vicissitudes and complexities to which the wish to help is heir.
Presented to the William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Society, October 19, 1962.
In order to treat patients competently and beneficially, motivation to help, like love, is not enough. It is necessary to know, in addition to being motivated, what is help and what is not help, and to know whom one is helping and with what. Necessary, too, is the skill, the know-how, in ways of giving help.
The concept "help" has many meanings in everyday parlance which are either unrelated or run counter to help in a valid psychotherapeutic sense. These meanings are often implicit in the psychotherapist's motivation to help. They can complicate and be destructive to the competent treatment of patients. The motivation to help in a valid psychotherapeutic sense is best regarded as the motivation to treat patients competently. Lewis Hill expresses it as the "wish to be of use to patients." Simplification by the therapist of this often complicated wish