Healing Through Meeting and the Problematic of Mutuality

Abstract

The question as to how much mutuality is possible and desirable between therapist and client transcends the bounds of orthodox psychoanalysis as it focuses on the real interhuman relationship between the two and not just on "transference" and "countertransference." Within this relationship there is mutuality of contact, trust, and common concern with the client's problems. However, as Martin Buber said in his dialogue with Carl Rogers in 1957, the therapist must experience the client's side of the relationship and imagine concretely what the client is thinking, feeling, and willing, but the client cannot be expected to practice "inclusion" with the therapist. This article surveys a wide range of practice and theory concerning mutuality from Freud and his followers to such therapists as Carl Rogers, Sidney Jourard, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Harold Searles, Margaret Sechaheye, Harry Guntrip, and Marvin Spiegelman. It concludes that the rejection of "mirrorlike impassivity" on the part of the therapist should not lead to a sentimental blurring of the essential distinction between therapy and less structured types of I-Thou relationships in which there are no normative limitations of mutuality. Yet the therapist is not only professionally accountable, but is personally responsible, even though the responsibility for whether the therapy works is ultimately a matter of the "between."