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The Meaning of Psychotherapy

Stephen Muse, Ph.D.
Director of Pastoral Institute in Columbus, Georgia

(Published by courtesy of Orthodox Pastoral-Counseling Center in Belgrade)

In the icon known in Greek as Philoxenia or "Hospitality to Strangers," the Holy Trinity-Father, Son, and Holy Spirit-are represented in the form of the three unknown messengers who Abraham and Sarah showed hospitality around their table. These strangers turned out to be angels sent from God to announce the fulfillment of God's promise that Abraham and Sarah would bear a son.

Hospitality is something we generally associate with good manners and social upbringing. In ancient times, however, hospitality was often a matter of life and death. The desert is a forbidding place. When I was travelling in Arizona recently and visited a monastery in the Sonora desert, I wasn't sure at first why I didn't want to vanish into the mountains as I usually feel when I get around wide open spaces I haven't previously explored. There were giant Saguaro Cacti for miles in every direction. Whirling dust funnels danced across the sands with ponderous, dry rocky peaks in the distant background. Then it dawned on me: it was inviting and forbidding at the same time! The desert is parched!

In Abraham's time, if the host didn't offer hospitality to strangers, giving them shade, water, and food, they might die. There were no service stations or rest rooms. Tents were often more than several day's journeys away from each oilier, as were oases offering respite from the burning sun.

Hospitality still is a matter of life and death in our culture, but for different reasons. The children of our modern age do not suffer for lack of water and food. People are thirsty for the Grace of being welcomed with the pure waters of deep attentiveness and nourished by understanding and compassion that emerge from stillness and presence which allow us to be unhurriedly with another person. That's why we see so many people stopping at our tents seeking the welcome of psychotherapy.

Hospitality to strangers is a reciprocal relationship. The people we pay attention to as psychotherapists are inviting us into the sacred tent of meeting that is their life and soul where their most precious treasures are kept. Depending on our behavior and the quality of attention, interest, and the respect we show, they may invite us further into their inner world and discover in the process renewal, healing, and confirmation of the value of their own integrity.

When we first begin psychotherapy training, we are anxious and busy inside, feeling we must fix people and take away their pain. Good physicians have always know that true soul-healing is much more than that.

D. W.Winnicott once remarked, "When the therapist is reacting there is no room for the client's mind."

In the beginning, we walk into the house of people's souls as anxious repair persons feeling the presence of a positive outcome on our shoulders, rather than as privileged guests, mindful of the presence of an Unseen Guest in our midst. Our minds are too busy with theories, diagnoses, and anxiety-driven self-doubts to really experience the person.

As we mature, we become quieter inside and begin to really notice people and even notice ourselves noticing them. We, learn that much of life involves suffering we can do nothing to alleviate. Rather, it is the human suffering which, rightly engaged, produces maturity and strength of character.

Being a good and responsive guest is what true psychotherapy or healing of the soul is all about. Very often we don't "fix" people. We walk the road to Emmaus with them. Our hearts burn together as co-pilgrims on a common human journey.

To the degree that we are truly open to this encounter, we ourselves arc changed in the process. We find that we are both host and guest simultaneously.

The hospitality we receive is of the most precious kind-entrance into fix-courtyard of the human soul in the presence of God. What we have to offer in return is the authenticity of our honest observations and responses to what we experience. Good psychotherapy is a humbling enterprise. Its essence is rooted in our humanity. Those become good priest-physicians who become humble and loving human beings, as harmless as doves, while being as discerning as serpents.

At the end of his life, G. G. Jung remarked, "I start over with each patient as if I KNEW NOTHING." In this respect, the good psychotherapist is always a student who heeds the wise counsel of saintly Cardinal Newman. "Growth is the only sign of life."

The same is true for the privilege of attending the births of talented, compassionate people in the arts and science of counseling. This too is a reciprocal relationship. I know I speak for all of the faculty when I say that we have been honored and changed by our relationships with you. At times we have been training angels unawares.

May God protect those whom He has sent forth to welcome his children home.