Targets of psychotherapy: treat the symptom or the cause?

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Today we’ll talk about the targets of psychotherapy and what psychotherapeutic influence generally is.

1. Symptom. The most obvious goal of psychotherapy is, of course, the problem directly stated by the client, which can manifest itself at behavioral, cognitive, emotional and bodily levels. In this case, the task of psychotherapy is to change specific patterns of behavior of the client and remove the symptom that he complains about. For example, if a client expresses a problem with fear of dogs, then our task will be to remove this fear. Cognitive behavioral therapy works at approximately this level.
2. Attitude to the problem. The second type with which humanistic and psychodynamic therapy mainly works is the attitude towards the problem. And here you can say that everything here is like in the joke, where a man with enuresis went to a psychologist, the enuresis did not disappear anywhere, but the man stopped worrying about it. In fact, everything is not that simple. After all, not all problems in our lives are solvable and not all of them are caused by psychological factors.

The most common example is our self-esteem and our attitude towards ourselves. Yes, probably if a person tries, he can become a little better, but in most cases people don’t change much, at least not in a couple of sessions…