The Medicalization of Psychotherapy Practicing under the Influence is an ethnographic account of the practice of clinical psychology under the reductionist auspices of biomedicine. Using Peircean semiotic analysis focusing in particular on modes in meaningmaking Sylvia Olney proposes that consciousness should be accorded the same conceptual and value status as nature and the human body. This would resolve the psychesoma split as mirrored both within and between the practice disciplines of medicine and psychotherapy and could also free practitioners and clientpatients from the idea of essential helplessness in the face of biology a notion which happens to contribute to the vested interests of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.