personally threatening have always expressed their anxiety through deprecating references to psychotherapy as involving self-absorption, navel gazing, and mental masturbation. More recently the ways in which psychotherapy is trivialized have become more subtle and perhaps even auto-immune in nature. That is, even among those who describe themselves as psychotherapists there seem to be increasing numbers who see their work as little more than providing a mental tune-up so that the client can function more efficiently in his or her already prescribed role in society. At the core those who dismiss all introspection as nonsense, and those who see psychotherapy as merely intended to relieve symptoms, both seem to share a disregard for the importance of deep introspection and the human relationship in the conduct of psychotherapy.
If one assumes that the human relationship is important in psychotherapy, then the selection of a good psychotherapist for a particular person involves much more than finding one with certain academic or professional credentials. It involves some exploration of the inherent compatibility, or fit, between the two persons involved before a prediction can be made of the probable outcome of the psychotherapy. Such exploration is all but prohibited by most managed care arrangements. First the psychotherapist is usually referred to as a “provider of services,” a term which seems to connote that the function is more important than the person. That might be true for a person who delivers a pizza to one’s home, but it is most certainly not true for a person with whom one contemplates entering into a most intimate relationship. After getting past the insult of thinking of one’s psychotherapist is