Loving Patients

"It is the psychotherapist's responsibility to discover what kind of parental relationship the patient needs in order to get better... The child grows up to be a disturbed person because he is not loved for his own sake as a person in his own right, and as an ill adult he comes to the psychotherapist convinced beforehand that this 'professional man' has no real interest or concern for him. The kind of love the patient needs is the kind of love that he may well feel in due course that the psychotherapist is the first person ever to give him. It involves taking him seriously as a person in his difficulties, respecting him as an individual in his own right even in his anxieties, treating him as someone with the right to be understood and not merely blamed, put-off, pressed and molded to suit other people's convenience, regarding him as a valuable human being with a nature of his own that needs a good human environment to grow in, showing him genuine human contact, real sympathy, believing in him so that in the course of time he can become capable of believing in himself. All these are ingredients of true parental love (agape, not eros), and if the psychotherapist can not love his patients in that way, he had better give up psychotherapy"

- Harry Guntrip (as quoted in http://www.integrativetherapy.com/en/articles.php?id=33)