The various streams of the current psychotherapy

Already in 2001, we noticed that more than two million adults people (5.2 %) in France resorted to the psychotherapy (national poll with a sample of 8 000 people, representative of the French population, made by the National Institute of Poll BVA, in technical collaboration with the FF2P and the magazine Psychology). So, in the face of a population very wide and coming of multiple sociocultural horizons, the psychotherapy had to enrich its practice of complementary approaches to those of the psychoanalysis. We estimate currently at close to 400, the number of the methods of psychotherapy existing in Europe and in the United States. This diversity which testifies of the dynamism of the psychotherapy also reflects an eclecticism which can disorientate the consultant. The main methods are grouped within four big streams of psychotherapy(Cf. Notice of the Upper Council of Hygiene of the Public Health of Belgium of 13/07/2005) :

The psychotherapies of psychoanalytical and psychodynamic orientation developed in the institutional framework, that of families, couples and groups. They also take place in individual sessions and always consider the demand of the subject just like the orthodox psychoanalyses (S Freud, C.G Jung, J. Lacan) to accompany him in the elaboration of his own solutions.

The psychotherapies of behavioral and cognitive orientation have theirs origins in the works of B.F. Skinner during the fifties on the effective behavior. They implemented various methods to adapt them to the people and to the particular situations to produce changes of effective behavior at these people.
The psychotherapies of family and systematic orientation result from school works of Palo Alto (1952-1962) which permitted to import in the field of the family therapy, the approach of the systems general theory the created by L. Von Bertalanffy. The family is envisaged as “a system” and the appearance of a symptom to one of her members as the demonstration of an imbalance of the system itself and consequently analyzed.


The humanist psychotherapies with experienced guidance were born in the United States in the middle of the fifties at the instigation of In. Maslow, F. Perls, W. Reich, C. Rogers… They are strongly influenced by the existentialists and phenomenological streams : Heidegger, Buber, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty… They have in common to put the human being and his subjective real-life experience in the center of the psychotherapy. It is in himself and by the development of his own resources that the consultant, with the support of the psychopractitioner, fetches the repair answer to his sufferings. To reach there, the humanists streams developed original approaches. Among the most characteristic we find: the emotional approach, the place given to the body, the technics of breathing, the therapeutic touch, the practice of residential seminars…

All these innovative approaches gave birth to various methods of psychotherapy. Among the most known, we find: the gestalt-therapy, the transactional analysis, the psycho-organic analysis, the psychosynthesis, the psychotherapy centered on the person, and more specifically in the field of the body psychotherapy : the bioenergy, the psychotherapeutic postural integration, the biodynamic psychology, the vegetotherapy, the somatotherapy…