Therapy ownership

Every therapy session belongs to both patient and therapist, to the interaction between them.

It was the psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan who, in the early twentieth century, developed a theory of psychiatry based on interpersonal relationships.

Breaking away from Freud's position that mental disorders were intrapsychic in origin (meaning “in one's mind”), Sullivan believed that our struggles were interactional (meaning “relational”).

He went so far as to say, "It's the mark of a senior clinician that he or she is the same person in their living room that they are in their office."

We can't teach patients to be relational if we aren't relational with them.

Source: Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb