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A Presentation of American Counseling Association ACA Great Minds in Counseling Dr. Jerome FrankPersuasion and Healing
Dr. Fred Bemak Hello, my name is Fred Bemak and I am pleased to welcome you today to the first film in a series sponsored by the American Counseling Association entitled Great Minds in Counseling. I along with my colleague Clemmont Vontress , I'm honored to bring to you a world renowned scholar, teacher and researcherDr. Jerome Frank. Dr. Frank is Professor in Ameritas in the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and has the unique distinction of having two degrees, one an MD with a specialization in psychiatry and a second a PhD in psychology. As counselors we are faced with many contemporary issues in a changing world. Dr. Frank is a master at bridging the past and the present in helping those of us who work in the field of mental health, better understand and prepare for our future. This film enables us to hear Dr. Frank discuss vital issues related to the field of counseling. On a more personal note, Dr. Frank is a warm and wonderful human being, who has touched many people's lives. I hope that this inspiring film with Dr. Frank will stimulate new ideas and perspectives about counseling for you as it did for me. And now, may I present to youDr. Jerome Frankinterviewed by Dr. Clemmont Vontress
Evergreen House Johns Hopkins University
Dr. Clemmont VontressDr. Frank what is psychotherapy?
Dr. Jerome FrankPsychotherapy is effort by a healer to make a... sufferer(ph) feel... feel more comfortable, the sufferer(ph) feel more comfortable or more efficient, through the use of words and symbols. Ah… there are several features about psychotherapy. I'd like to say something about to start with. This is a… most of you listeners will be psychologists I imagine, and they would like to think of psychotherapy is a kind of applied behavioral science. I think that’s the wrong model, because all science is based on facts, and facts are invariant over time, they are replicable and so on, but the world vary and in Psychotherapy is the world of meanings. And meanings that differ very much from facts.
Dr. Jerome FrankAnd… so I'd say psychotherapy is an effort to change people's meanings from negative to positive through this relationship with the therapist. Now, let me say a word about that. If you take that positive about psychotherapy then psychotherapy is not so much a form of science as a form of rhetoric. Now rhetoric has a bad name in our country, but it's very old discipline and a very good discipline. And it has... when you've been... begin to look into rhetoric or what was it (inaudible ) said about rhetoric, what Aristotle said about it, it turns out to be very much like the principles of psychotherapy. So if you think of psychotherapy as a form of rhetoric, there are three aspects to rhetoric.
Rhetoric and Psychotherapy The Ethos of the Rhetorician The Arousal of Emotion The Argument
Jerome Frank One is the ethos of the rhetorician. The ethos is whatever makes him incredible, because you make authority over the (inaudible ). The other will be arousal of emotion, which happens in all psychotherapy. And the third is we used to call the argument. And the argument is everything else. Now therapies differ in the argument, and all the different forms we have are different forms of therapy, are different arguments, but that they all have in common, the relationship and the emotional arousal. Psychotherapy depends on the fact that that human beings react not to the facts or experiences perse, but as to the meanings of these facts as they interpret them. And the tiny example comes to mind from my daughter when she was learning to speak. This is not the daughter who collaborated in persuasion and healing. This is (inaudible ) it's another daughter. But anyway, she was quite a frightened little girl. And she was lying in bed one evening, when a lawn mower went by the window, very loud old-fashioned, hand-driven lawn mower and she panicked. And I remember picking her up and holding and explaining, that's just a lawn mower, it's not going to harm and so forth, and that was that. She quieted down and the next evening the lawn mower went by again and she started to tighten up, because your faced determines to tight. And she was about to cry. And then she suddenly said, lawn mower and relaxed. Well, she… she did given a meaning to this, it's a, it's a very good example of the way that a better need to who mastered events depends on believing on in some way. And here she given... She didn’t know what this was very fighting noise. She gave an innocuous label and then she was okay. And it has a very good paradigm of all the psychotherapy as well as rhetoric was the same thing. So the aim of Psychotherapy is to transform the meanings the patients attribute to events, from fright... from negative ones to positive ones. As this happened, as my daughter did with the lawn mower.