Changes in Social Structure

THERE HAVE BEEN IMPORTANT changes in social structures and functioning both in families, in psychiatric institutions, universities and society at large since the Second World War (e.g., democratization, equalization, neo-feminism, therapeutic communities, the social-psychiatric movement, student revolution, sexual revolution). Have the ways of teaching and/or organizing education in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy been part of or at least following up this development? To what extent, and in which areas do we desire freedom for ourselves, our patients, and our students; and what sort of coercion do we (as teachers) exercise upon them? What sort of power and control do we feel necessary and for what reasons?

New groups of people want psychotherapy, and different professions are applying psychotherapeutic concepts, and to some extent psychotherapeutic methods. The question may be raised, Have we appreciated the full consequences of these facts by altering our psychotherapeutic methods, our teaching institutions, and our conceptualizations?

The widening scope of psychotherapy and disparity of methods, therapeutic settings, and theoretical developments have had different sorts of impact and influence on learning and teaching procedures in different countries. We have here an opportunity to discuss whether we have grasped the full consequences of our expanding knowledge of human functioning. To clarify the discussion I propose a general model of psychotherapy which covers the psychotherapeutic part-processes, such as:

• 1making conscious the patient's limitations (in the present, due to being stuck in the past).

• 2transcending these limitations and

• 3the integration of experiences inside and outside the therapeutic situation.

These phenomena are in constant interaction with the advances of science. New trends in basic research and philosophy (e.g., "existentialism, " "structuralism, " "neo-Marxism") may promote new trends in the social sciences including psychology, sociol