[MFLoon]

Calling it 'conversational prostitution' isn't really an accurate analogy; or rather, it shouldn't be if you're taking the therapy seriously, though a lazy therapist/patient couple could certainly devolve into something more like that. A prostitute provides a luxury service; a therapist is more like a business consultant, as you are both expected to put in work to understand the problems and work together towards solutions. So, sure, you could try to find the solutions yourself, but you don't know what you don't know, or even if you do generally know what your problems are, there's still an opportunity cost in building up the psychological domain expertise to fix them 'in house', when you could expedite the process by bringing in an expert.