Anyone who voluntarily spends more than 38 hours a week at the computer, said specialists at the second international psychotherapy conference in Vienna, probably has a problem.

And that's just one of the new challenges facing psychotherapists on the threshold of the third millennium. What kind of self-image or identity will human clones have? What sort of self-image will we have when a changing world economy forces us to scratch out our living from an ever-changing series of jobs in a shadowy sub-economy?

Just as there are psychiatric disorders a-plenty, so are there plenty of different types of therapy -- some 600 in all. Psychologist Eva Jaeggi from Berlin's Technical University estimates that three times more people turn to questionable spiritual therapists and feel-good healers than torepresentatives of the generally recognised schools of psychiatric thought.

Generally, those are people looking for guarantees and absolute certainty, not for ways to deal with life and uncertainty.

So many people are lined up at the world's spiritual filling stations, hoping to talk or paint or dance out all their troubles, that the psychotherapists themselves need help -- their self-confidence has taken a beating.

Therapists probably can't influence the course of world events, Swiss existence analyst Gian Condrau said during the five-day conference. In fact, he said, the whole conference -- an assembly of 4,500 experts from around the world -- would hardly make a ripple in the outside world. Psychologists from Yugoslavia and neighbouring countries admitted that the political steamrollers in the Balkans had rolled right over them during the Kosovo crisis. All they can do now, they said, is try to patch up the damage left by intolerance, prejudice and propaganda.

``A psychotherapist's job is to help apatient gain control of his personal psychological territory,'' said Stephan Rudas, head of Vienna's psycho-social service. Sticking with the military analogies, Congress President Alfred Pritz called psychotherapists a ``peace-keeping force for the spirit, a sort of personal liberation movement.''

In any event, psychotherapists -- ``mercenary sanitation workers cleaning up the world's spiritual garbage,'' as the Austrian magazine Profil called them -- have come a long way from the purely research-oriented work of psychotherapy's founding father, Sigmund Freud.