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When I use the expression psychotherapy I must define my meaning of the term; it is somewhat different from what has so far been considered psychotherapy.
I shall leave out the word psyche for the moment; it seems to me more important to find out first what therapy means. Originally therapy meant service, not treatment. The person who serves acknowledges the person he serves as his master, the person who treats works an object with his hand (German behandeln) — in its literal and its figurative meaning. The doctor's fate is to serve and to treat patients: his activity is ambivalent. Yet there is a great, a decisive difference if the emphasis is on the serving or the treating, and I do not consider it accidental that the word therapy combined itself almost automatically with the word psyche. As soon as the word psyche is defined more accurately one can see that psychotherapy means something different from psychological treatment. I shall come back to this later, here I merely want to emphasise that behind the two expressions therapy and treatment hides the inner conflict of our profession, that they express the fight every doctor has to fight daily and hourly, and that the two words express the specific tendency that has predominated in medical theory and practice during the changing course of time. The doctor who treats patients believes that he practices medicine only with part of his personality, be it his knowledge or his ability, according to his philosophy he will call his activity a science or an art, or even — if his professional ethos, which partly promotes and partly hinders modesty, allows it — a craft that is rooted in experience, yet he always activates only a part of his human personality, and the word treatment will always mislead him into believing that he should guide and could or should direct