After reading your recent posts on this thread, Poet, I think I now know where you're coming from. I could be wrong, but. All of my own therapy has come from therapists in private practice. I've never been exposed to a state system as you appear to have. I can well imagine that state systems would attract some T's who couldn't make it on their own in private practice. And that there would be a larger chance, in a state system, that you'd get time-serving T's.

Then with regard to your point concerning family being better than T's. I could be wrong but my strong impression is that people don't go to therapy seeking a relationship with T that would supplant family. Perhaps you've read a problematic description of transference that gave you that idea. Many, if not most, therapy patients had terrible families that did not give them love and provoked the pathology from which the patients suffer. One goes to therapy (hopefully) to unlearn the "wrong" lessons learned in childhood. If competent (and if a correct match with the patient's personality), a T can help a patient overcome the psychological problems caused by a toxic IRL family. And to do that a T doesn't even HAVE to "care" for a patient. Doing that is just what T's are trained to do, if they want, in a dispassionate manner.

So, no, I don't believe at all that patients, by going into therapy, are rejecting their IRL families. If they have family relationships that are good, among, say, brothers and sisters, and only have problems with their parents or one of them, I think most patients would continue positive relations. I don't see any "negation of family" from the patient-therapist relation.

Take care.