Therapy Toronto Psychotherapy Definitions

Technical Terms

Psychotherapy employs a vast vocabulary of technical terms in order to describe its methods and procedures. People who come into psychotherapy sometimes find these strange terms to be unnecessarily confusing.

A prime example is the use of the word 'object' by psychoanalytically trained or oriented therapists to refer to somebody in whom the client is interested.

The client in this case is known as the 'subject' since the client is the one being interested. This tends to make people seem very abstract and distant to each other and lessens the personal experience of having feelings about another human. By the way, affect is a more clinical term for the word feeling.

To lessen the confusion we are offering these brief notes on language to visitors to this site.

You will find that the therapists on this site will not indulge in obscuring things by using unnecessarily complex language. We have elsewhere defined some of the words often heard.

Let's hope this makes therapy a little easier to understand!

Psychotherapy glossary by Toronto Therapy Network is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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