What is the difference between psychotherapy, therapy and counseling?
A. While these three terms are used randomly and is more of a matter of semantics rather than clinical meaning and there are major overlaps between these three practice modalities, there are some differences in my understanding that I would like to share with you. Psychotherapy tends to be associated with a process of psychological treatment that is longer-term and open ended. There are people who participate in psychotherapy, as well as psychoanalysis, for years, some up to even ten to twenty years. However, there are people who engage in psychotherapy for only a few sessions or a few months. To me, the key criteria for psychotherapy is that it is open-ended. The therapist and client do not discuss at the outset how long therapy will last or what the goals are. Therapy usually refers to the briefer model of goal-oriented treatment and tends to be closed-ended, with the clear understanding that the agreed upon termination date can be renegotiated. Proponents of briefer therapy approach
