IJSP Number 5, 2023

100 (psycho)therapist or the doctor said. Nowadays the client leaves the cabinet and instead of conforming to what the therapist had suggested or requested, makes, quickly and automatically, a search on the internet about what the therapist said. And that is not all, because before choosing a therapist, the same client goes through everything the internet has on offer concerning the psychotherapist – as a very responsible person who keeps himself up to date. It is not, as it was sometimes ago, a question of trust anymore; nowadays you do not have to trust anybody just because they are somebody. No!, not at all, because nowadays every somebody is, in fact, an anybody and the offer of “anybodies” is overwhelming. Every client can choose from a range of psychotherapeutic offers (therapies and therapists as well) and, consequently, he or she feels intitled to check, verify and put under a magnifying glass every service (or service provider, for that matter); by doing that, one has the feeling of doing something personal and responsible when in fact it is what everybody does, sifting throughout endless streams of data on the net. In such times, where scrutinizing and verifying has become the norm of a general scepticism, I imagine that it is not very easy to be a therapist anymore. Being scrutinized from every angle, verified for credentials online and crosschecked during and immediately after every meeting, means a complete lack of trust in the authority given by the psychotherapeutic status. Although psychotherapy is more fashionable than ever before and the demands have increased exponentially, trust in its professional status has declined. Our clients have the power and the means to verify us, what we said and what we did, and if that is not convenient, they can choose some other offer on the market. In that sense, and whit a pinch of salt, our clients are “evolving” towards a kind of co-therapists working – via the internet and their own psychological problems – at least as much as we do, if not more. Maybe, ironically speaking (at least for the moment), it is time that therapy too should be transformed into a platform enterprise where the obsolete therapist is replaced by a computer algorithm (isn’t all the DSM-n stuff already going in such a direction?) that can be asked for advice, counselling, or consultation by anyone in need (without waiting-lists or appointments, but “in real time”). Of course, this is madness, but, unfortunately, not at all a controlled madness, or controlled folly as Juan Matus in C. Castaneda’s novels put it [17]. In order to attain the very high level of controlled folly – concerning one’s own life – as an existential choice, a (psycho)therapist has at least two choices which are intimately linked: 1. The best therapist is so good that he or she, paradoxically, does not practice psychotherapy as a job or profession anymore. It is not that they are becoming self- sufficient, or arrogant, or locked up in their introversion or in a delirious hubris, but that they, being on such an advanced level of differentiation, can actively apply the concept of “non-action” or “controlled folly” to their own life and existential orientation. If, as it is shown and argued in Castaneda’s books, everything in life is folly and absurd and consequently meaningless (as the existentialist philosophers too realized and wrote about), we should at least control that folly. At least by