Heilende Worte: Therapeutische Kommunikation in Antike und Gegenwart

The notion of therapeutic communication was spread mainly by Paul Watzlawick. He is building on antique roots and argues that the working principles are known since the antique and were wide spread in the art of healing. The famous statement of the sophist Antiphon from Athena »I can heal the sick with words« Watzlawick explains in the context of rhetoric and he refers explicitly to the »somatic rhetoric« of Quinitilian and his Instituto Oratoria. For a better understanding of this statement the Socratic art of speech will be introduced practically, which shows itself in contrast to the rhetoric of sophism: as talk room of truth in opposition to a talk room of method. Even the giving of a remedy is indispensably connected with the dialog between the physician and the patient and only in this combination a catharsis is enabled. The working principles of the therapeutic communication relate to all areas of rhetoric, that means not only inventio, dispositio and elocutio but also actio and pronuntatio as well as the whole context of speech.