The story of my life! lol
I did go for two years of psychotherapy a long time ago, a year each with two new psychiatric residents. I could've been their first patient for all I know. I'm sure I got something out of it but I'd have a hard time saying what.

I lean toward the "alternative", myself. Some things are "unscientific" because they really are nonsense, others only because science is still catching up to them. Carl Rogers, who helped invent counseling, was too alternative and unscientific for my teachers when I was in school. So was Abe Maslow, whom theo mentions earlier in this thread. Now that I'm safely out of school and don't even have to pretend to be scientific, I'm free to favor Alan Watts, the author of Psychotherapy East and West. Last year I quoted from another of his books here.

I've had a long history with alternative approaches myself; I posted just a little about some of them here and here (two replies to the same long thread). I'm pretty sure it was Fritz Perls, the Gestalt guy, who said (though I can't find where he said it): suppose someone came to him because their hand was always in a fist and they couldn't seem to open it. If he worked with them, he'd first get them to make an even tighter fist. As they learned how to do that, they'd also be learning how to open their hand. To me, that's pretty much the epitome of an alternative approach -- and I wouldn't be surprised if the same principle turned out somehow to underlie a good part of accredited, scientific therapy.

There! The surface has been scratched, even if just barely.