Counselling Vs Psychotherapy

1024 Words5 Pages

Counselling and psychotherapy are essentially used to describe the same process of overcoming personal difficulties and work towards a positive change in one’s life. The early definition of counselling was more to do with legal advice side of things, such as offering legal advice or to seek legal counsel, but over the centuries that meaning evolved toward the more therapy based counselling. The next few paragraphs will include some of the historic origins of both counselling and psychotherapy and the potential similarities and differences between them, as most of the time there’s a potential confusion around these terms; some of the parallel concepts, such as pastoral support and the modern aspect of counselling and psychotherapy, from the …show more content…

Meaning that the old way of thinking about mental illness was that it was caused by the Gods or that there was some kind of super natural reason why people acted the way that they did, but Hippocrates taught that the brain was the organ of the mind, that changes of the brain and damage to the brain chanced the way that people thought and felt. This transition from looking at the external sources for the cause of mental illness to an internal sources such as the brain and the body is why Hippocrates gets so much credit, the understanding that it is within the person that lead to the changes in the way that think and …show more content…

Freud initially wanted to further investigate the unconscious when his patient had physical symptoms that they had no recollection of the original cause of these symptoms, furthermore Freud wasn’t just interested in finding out the cause of the symptoms in his patients, he wanted to understand the unconscious mind as a whole and in great detail. All of the technique in which he began his work lead other theorists to either adapt and use, change completely or discard. In essence, Freud’s basic view of needing to understand the whole area of one’s psyche will allow a true knowledge of people and their situation and therefor obtaining the right information to help the client. (Margaret Hough) Van Renteghem and Van Eeden were one of the first physician to call themselves psychotherapists, Eeden believed that psychotherapy was “the cure of the body by the mind, aided by the impulse of one mind to another ” (Ellenberger