The idea of psychotherapy in a group of people who have never experienced it.

Abstract

The work we are presenting is part of a more extensive research in which we analyze the idea that people have of psychotherapy, supposing that this study is at the same time relevant but not present enough in the wide field of researches that concern psychotherapy. In a previous work, we presented the results of a research that explored the perceptions on psychotherapy by a group of psychotherapists and a group of patients (Giovagnoli, Dolcetti & Paniccia, 2008). In that case we took into consideration perceptions that referred to actual psychotherapy experiences lived by the people we interviewed. On the contrary, in this case, we interviewed a group of people who stated that they never had any experiences with psychotherapy; we will refer to this group of people as “non-patients”. We once again need to remark the fact that, in this case, we explored thoughts about psychotherapy that were never confirmed through direct experiences; in this sense, these thoughts can be referred to the social role of psychotherapy.