4. In your opinion, what is the ultimate goal of therapy?
This is an excellent question and one I think where we will see differences between the goals of depth psychotherapy and more behaviorally oriented approaches.
I have always liked Freud's formulation of a healthy person as one who can love and work. Because that does capture most of what a rich life is about. Therapy helps people feel real, competent and involved in their world. It pays attention to those experiences, both remembered and forgotten, that block or distort achieving those goals. At the end of therapy, a person should be able to know love, to work competently and to play freely.
So in my mind, it is not simply a matter of changing how a person thinks, or reframing. It is about allowing those barriers to having the life one wants to be explored and known and felt -- and then developing other ways of responding to life than the ways those barriers created. And it isn't enough to be free of symptoms, because life is more than the presence or absence of symptoms. It is about participating in the world, about loving openly and receiving love, about working and being rewarded by that work, and about playing and having fun.