Psychotherapy

This chapter develops several successive cultural psychological perspectives on psychotherapy. It begins with a historical perspective, which outlines the development of psychotherapy from Mesmer to Freud and leads to questions concerning the access to the psychotherapeutic profession and to psychotherapy training that arise from this history. On this basis, a profile of psychotherapy is developed from a sociology of knowledge perspective. Thereby some aspects of its tension with other societal players, such as legislators and health insurance companies, become understandable. Finally, the perspective expands to a cultural-critical horizon, against which current challenges for psychotherapy—its mobilizability within the framework of a neoliberal agenda and, closely related to this, the effects of digitization on it—come into view.