Interpretation—Is That All There Is?

Mrs. Zabriskie: We'll be hearing next from Dr. Harold H. Mosak, who has come from Chicago where he's Chairman of the Board and a professor at the Alfred Adler Institute of Chicago. He was a trustee of the Illinois Board of Examiners of Professional Psychology. Dr. Mosak is on the editorial board of Individual Psychology. He was formerly the Director of Training of the Alfred Adler Institute in Chicago and the President of the North American Society of Adlerian Psychology. Among his many publications are “Alfred Adler, His Influence on Psychology Today.” He is also the author of Early Recollections of Adler, Freud, and Jung.

I am not a born Adlerian. Some practitioners attend a school or take a residency where one form of psychotherapy is taught, and they identify with that particular school, sometimes without ever having been exposed to other systems of psychotherapy. In my own training, beginning thirty-five or forty years ago, I led a “schizophrenic” existence. I first learned psychotherapy from Carl Rogers. He taught me that interpretation was not essential, even verboten, and that if I provided a warm, permissive, accepting atmosphere, the client would provide his own insights and find his own “cure.” (I put that in quotation marks because that is something at which Rogers and the Rogerian group did not aim.) Simultaneously, in almost four years of internship at a Veterans Administration hospital, I was being supervised by therapists all of whom were Freudians, with the exception of one Jungian. They taught me, and I oversimplify, that the only genuine psychotherapy was deep and intensive, that change depended upon the acquisition of insight, and that the acquisition of insight always