This article reviews the meaning, use, and utility of supportive psychotherapy, a widespread treatment with an undeservedly malign birthright and history. This entails sorting through the historical definitions of supportive therapy and reviewing its good research track record achieved despite being the comparison condition. The author then defines brief supportive psychotherapy (BSP), a manualized, “common factors” treatment that has fared well in research settings, which may provide a model for clinical and research use in the future.
I might also have called this chapter "Reasonable Torture, Or the Sanctities," since there is an indelible link between servility and torture, between theory and what I call the "sanctities." On the following pages, I want to question the sanctified sphere of academic theorizing, the experience of servility that is tied to the practice of humanitarian care, and, ultimately, the choices we are offered as scholars, writers, and teachers in this time of terror. They are difficult choices. They force us to ask what it means to do intellectual work and how it fares in the present landscape of debasement and ruin.
