Emotional Investment

Emotional Investment: Transforming Psychotherapeutic Assumptions argues that most current psychotherapies tend to be objective or quasi-objective in their orientation, where "objective" means that mental health and mental illness are assumed to be realities beyond the clinician's and the patient's experience (e.g. psychoanalysis, ego psychology, self psychology, and behaviorism) and "quasi-objective" means that though lip service is given to relative realities, the actual assumptions are objective (e.g. cognitive therapy and reality therapy). As such, most psychotherapies today involve a power differential between therapist and client, where the therapist has power over the client. Emotional Investment is offered as a new form of professional/non-professional interaction in the mental health field that equalizes the power between professional and non-professional. It argues that traditional objective and relative categories of reality must be transformed into experiential categories in order to eliminate the power differential between professional and the non-professional in the mental health field.