[Readiness for professional psychotherapy]

Statistics dealing with transfers to, and attendance at psychotherapy sessions and with patients' reasons for prematurely terminating such treatment are first analyzed. Causes of unwillingness to accept such treatment despite suffering are then presented. The author concludes that standards of everyday psychology require improvement, that psychotherapy should be accepted as an integral part of basic medical care, and that measures should be taken to make the symptoms indicating the need for such treatment more widely known and to give more realistic expectations of what it can achieve.