Is Paul a good therapist?

Paul has made mistakes, but in general yes he's a good therapists and he cares a lot. i think its what Gina says is that he gets too close with some of his patients and it tends to make them more dependent on their therapists.

I think the 3rd season shows Paul is human.

I think he can be a good therapist and the best therapist in the world cannot fix some people, maybe most people.
The therapeutic relationship is kind of sad, a friendship like prostitution for those who cannot get it, so they rent a best friend for an hour. If the person can use that to their advantage then the therapist is a good therapist. If the person could sit down and talk his problems out to the wall, then the wall would be a good therapist. I think there are just experiences … this is my pet theory of the minute for discussion on IMDB! ;-)

What is a good friend for example. Friends can hurt and betray each other and even destroy the friendship, but does that mean that it never existed or was not there, and who knows when whatever relationship is going to wither and die.

And then there is the fact that it is not real, and without the money the person is not your "friend" and will not be "nice" to you.

There are times with Paul is petty and immature. I think the ending of season 3 is such a time. But all in all he is not a bad person, he just does not and can not know the fullness of what he is doing or why, just like any other of us.

Our models of the world, ourselves and other people are incomplete. The human being is really not that far developed or evolved, and our current environment and the rules of life in the modern 21st century are new to our physical entities and clash with our psychological beings … studies keep coming along that like Copernicus or Newton change our views of ourselves in the cosmos. In this century I think there will be a lot of catching up, but even with that we still do not know that much about ourselves or techniques of how to live in the world, because underneath all of it is the fact that we are all at war with each and trying to get stuff from each other using what we can learn about each about fooling each other, and ourselves.

I think therapy is sort of a gamble, a shot in the dark and it takes two, and the odds are just not good, so it's not just the therapist being good. It's like surgeons too, some surgeons take on the really tough patients and it skews their stats down … yet they have huge experience and may be the best surgeons in the world. You can't tell that by conventional statistics either.