zlacker

This is very true, and I would add to it that the dominant paradigm in most therapy these days (at least those forms coming from a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy background) have "graduation" as an explicit goal: the client feels like they've addressed what they want to address and no longer need the ongoing relationship.

This is largely due to a crisis in the field in the late 70s/early 80s when several studies demonstrated that talk therapy had outcomes no different than no therapy. In both cases, some got better, some got worse, some didn't change. CBT was a direct result of that, prioritizing and tracking positive outcomes, and from CBT came a lot of different approaches, all similarly focussed on being demonstrably effective.

Talk therapy isn't a cure-all, but it's definitely more results-oriented than it was 50 years ago.