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The idea that people plan their behavior is considered common sense for most human activities. This commonsense view, however, is not extended to the behavior of the patients in therapy. Patients' behavior is thought to be governed to some extent by unplanned unconscious forces. In this paper, I challenge that view. I assume that the primary motive of patients in psychotherapy, including psychoanalysis, is to solve their problems by disproving the pathogenic beliefs that underlie them, and it assumes, too, that patients make and carry out plans for solving their problems. Patients' plans are for testing their pathogenic beliefs with the therapist in the hope that the therapist will not react to their tests as their beliefs predict. In research studies carried out by the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group, we demonstrated that we can reliably infer patients' plans from their behavior at the beginning of therapy and that patients work consistently in accordance with these plans throughout the therapy. Support for this thesis appears in infant research, evolutionary psychology, academic cognitive research, and linguistics. The view of the therapeutic process proposed here bears on the current discussion of the therapist's use of authority and integrates several current trends in the theory of therapy.