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Harold Greenwald's new book, Decision Therapy, is an excellent example of the main therapeutic technique that it expounds. For after two decades as a practicing psychoanalyst, including a stint as President of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, Greenwald has forthrightly and directly decided that the essence of psychotherapy is not free association, analysis of the transference, or dream interpretation but the helping of the client to make a decision to change. As he notes:
the only thing that happens in therapy-regardless of the methods or techniques used-is that the person you're working with is helped to make a decision to change, and then is helped to carry out the decision. According to Greenwald even the most difficult problems-homosexuality, addiction to drugs, and various forms of compulsive or destructive behavior-respond remarkably favorably to this kind of therapy, once a wish to change has led to a decision to change.
Greenwald makes a persuasive case for his central thesis. He shows with remarkable facility that much of what we call “emotional disturbance” stems from an individual's conscious or unconscious decision to act the way he or she does. Furthermore, he shows that if the “neurotic,” “borderline,” or “sexually deviated” person is clearly shown what his choices have been, how he can make alternative choices, and some of the possibilities of these alternatives, he is able and likely to effect considerable personality changes, often in an amazingly brief period of time. Greenwald writes.