Defining psychotherapy broadly as "a way of handling the experience of illness" in which the therapist's personality becomes part of the healing process, the author traces its course in the history of British psychiatry. He points out that, although the older, organically oriented hospital psychiatry still occupies a formal position of strength, the National Health Service has prompted the evolution of a general dynamic approach to the treatment of the mentally ill, encompassing several of the previously isolated "camps" in psychiatry.Abstract Teaser