Amida Trust Papers: Key Concepts of Phenomenological Therapy

Occasional paper

KEY CONCEPTS OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL THERAPY

by Dharmavidya David Brazier

INTRODUCTION

This paper provides an outline of some of the key concepts in phenomenological therapy as practised at the Eigenwelt Centre. These concepts have developed out of the philosophical basis provided by the work of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (EI Paper 3).

The paper is arranged as an examination of twelve concepts as follows:
1. epoche, bracketing and the therapeutic attitude;
2. the primacy of perception;
3. apodicity;
4. attention and phenomenal fields;
5. inner and outer space;
6. altered states and alternative worlds;
7. empathy as realization;
8. description, equalization and descriptive challenge;
9. resonance, congruence and felt sense;
10. acceptance and positive regard;
11. exchange of self and other; and
12. therapy as path.

These twelve each embody an essential competence for the therapist, a basic truth about the therapeutic situation. They should not, however, be though of as each standing alone. Rather, these and other related ideas form a network of meanings which may help to hold us on task as we descend into the undergrowth of actual human encounters with others.

WHAT IS PHENOMENOLOGICAL THERAPY

Phenomenological therapy is an approach to inter-personal helping which sees the direction of personal growth as leading not to conformity to social norms so much as to enrichment of experiencing. Many psychotherapeutic approaches are essentially normative, expecting the "maladjusted" client to become "adjusted", to fit in. Phenomenology acknowledges that each person sees the world in his or her own way and that to fulfil one's potential is not a matter of fitting in but of realizing what brings one to life.

Phenomenology is not, however, isolationist, nor even particularly individualistic. In reaction to the normative approaches, some therapies have developed which are entirely focused on doing one's own thing without regard for others. Phenomenology is an approach which recognizes that what brings us to life is engagement with the world around us. Phenomenology is the study of perception, and perception is the process by which our psyche becomes enmeshed in the world. A person's uniqueness does not mean that they are cut off from their world, it means that we are each a unique mirror of or light upon that world. Our uniqueness gives each of us a special contribution to make.

Phenomenological therapy, therefore, is a relatively extrovert therapy in the sense that it is concerned with the ways a person sees, experiences, feels and gets engaged with their surroundings. It is concerned with evolving ways to enrich this involvement. To this end a wide variety of expressive and communicative media may be used.

The task of the therapist is both to tune in to where the client is starting from and to become engaged with the client in a process of creative interaction which stimulates new experimentation and discovery. This type of therapy can therefore also often be fun. It is not a matter only of uncovering the client's misery but also of helping the client find ways of delighting in the world.

EPOCHE, BRACKETING AND THE THERAPEUTIC ATTITUDE

Since this approach is not convergent or normative, it is necessary for the therapist to develop a free floating mentality to a radical degree. The basic operation in phenomenological method is called epoche (pronounced e-po-shay). Epoche refers to the attempt to view phenomena free from all presumption. It is the attempt to reach a state of genuine open-mindedness. Bracketing refers to the mental operation of setting aside presumptions. The first proposition of phenomenological therapy is that the possibilities for psychological growth in an individual are in proportion to the extent to which presumptions can be bracketed.

A presumption is any idea which is taken for granted. In phenomenology, the total set of presumptions held by a person or group of people is referred to as "the natural attitude". A culture, for instance, is largely defined by its natural attitude, ie. by what its members take for granted. It follows, therefore, that phenomenological therapists accept the relativity of culture and learn to be able to stand aside both from their culture of origin and from the prevailing culture of therapy itself.

If we consider a few things that are commonly taken for granted it may become clearer what this principle implies. It is commonly taken for granted, for instance, that the client wants to "get better", wants to avoid pain, does not want to die, would like to be "normal" and so on. It is commonly taken for granted that the client wants to change. None of this is necessarily the case, however. Indeed, what the client may well be engaged in in therapy may be an attempt to find out whether any of these things do apply in his or her case.

Again, in most schools of therapy the basic theory of the approach is concerned with identifying what to listen for. Certain material presented by the client is considered important and other material is considered to be superficial. Phenomenologists try to guard against this attitude. Elsewhere (EI Paper 26) I have, for instance, written about how it is commonly taken for granted by therapists that the only thing that is significant in the world of the client is their relationships with other people. Phenomenology, however, is just as concerned with the relationships we have with things, and with the natural environment as well as those we have with our fellow humans.

Thirdly, it is a common assumption in therapy that all that matters to a person really is themselves. For many therapists, the whole technique of therapy is to refer whatever the client says to self. Thus many therapists make a point of getting people to "say I" (eg. Passons 1975, p.77 et seq.) as a deliberate policy. This policy clearly rests upon presuppositions on the part of the therapist about what is good for the client. It is, however, just as possible to make a case for avoiding saying "I" (eg. Macy 1991, p.85) on the ground that this reifies the person and thereby hinders change. The point here is not to assert that one or other of these views is correct, but to expose them both as views, and therefore as products of cultural relativity.

As therapists we have to examine our work again and again to tease out what we are taking for granted, what presumptions we are making. This is not easy. It is the attempt to see what we are not seeing. Sometimes this process can be helped by stepping outside our own culture. Talking in depth with people from a different world view makes clear to us how much of what we believe is just that, ie. what we believe, and not simply what is.

To achieve a real bracketing of our personal presumptions is a big challenge. Most people have come into the therapy business because they hold a number of ideals. Ideals, however, are presumptions. The therapist who could completely bracket their own bias could understand the world view of a theist and an atheist, a communist and a fascist, a feminist and a traditional male, a democrat and a monarchist, a vegetarian and a hunter, equally well. The epoche gets rid of the emotions which arise from the idea that there are good people and bad people. A complete epoche may be beyond our ability at present but the more unconditional we can become in our regard of the client, the more possibilities there are likely to be for the person to find their own path. The whole point of therapy is to provide a place where a person, however good or bad they might be considered from the viewpoint of the natural attitude, can be accepted sufficiently well for them to re-establish contact with their own basic humanity.

THE PRIMACY OF PERCEPTION

The phenomenal world is the world which appears to us. If five people all witness the same incident, each will report a different perspective upon it. Each will, in some degree, have seen something different. Although there may be a good deal of common ground between them, no two people live in the same phenomenal world. Each person's perceptions are different. For this purpose we may say that the words "perception" and "experience" are virtually synonymous.

Phenomenological therapy involves trying to appreciate the world of the client. The important point to keep constantly in mind, therefore, is that what we are dealing with in therapy is always the client's perception. If the client tells us about his mother, he is actually telling us one of his perceptions of his mother. We can be confident firstly that he has other perceptions of this same person and secondly that if we ourselves ever met his mother, our impression of her would not match the one which the client gives us. This does not mean that his account is wrong. It means that it may be taken as an accurate account of his perception, no more, no less.

Philosophically, we can say that there is really no way of demonstrating what exists "out there", in its own right as it were. All we ever know are perceptions. People spend a great deal of their lives talking. One of the reasons they do this is to try to get their perceptions to match those of others. Nobody ever completely achieves this. In some respects, therefore, what the therapist is doing in trying to perfect the epoche is the opposite of what most people are doing most of the time. While the therapist is trying to appreciate the relativity of all perceptions, the ordinary person is striving for an elusive sense of certainty. The therapist's journey is an unsettling one.

Since phenomenological therapy is work with the client's perceptions a wide variety of methods may be used to allow these perceptions to be communicated. Apart from words, we may use painting, drawing, phantasy, enactment, modelling, dance or any other expressive method if this will serve the purpose of enabling the client to give communicable form to a perception. A basic principle of phenomenological therapy, therefore, is that personal growth is a function of expansion of experience. Expressive art work is thus therapeutic in itself and not just as a means to the revelation of material for further analysis. If the client does wish to analyse the material, this "analysis" is itself an artistic activity leading to further creativity.

A further important principle is the idea that experience precedes verbalization. This notion may seem self-evident but it is a point about which philosophers have always been divided and much everyday psychologizing implicitly assumes that it is not so. Thus, for instance, we spend a lot of time looking for reasons for feelings, implicitly assuming that there was a reason in our minds prior to the arising of the feeling. Actually what we arrive at is not so much a reason as a rationalization. Let us look at some examples.

If a tiger walks into the room, we feel fear immediately. If we are later asked why we felt frightened we are likely to say, because I knew that the tiger could hurt me. It is not the case, however, that the thought "the tiger can hurt me" passed through our brain before our blood ran cold. Similarly, if you like or dislike someone, you will be aware of this as a sentiment before you are able to say what it is about them that is attracting you or putting you off. Or again, when you go back to a town you have not visited for some time, you will probably not be able, in advance, to give a set of directions about how to get to a particular shop which you remember, but when you arrive in the town you find that the route "comes back to you" as you tread it.

We can see from these examples that memory, experience and feelings are all closely connected with action and with the fact that we are embodied beings. We are bodies which move about and the body often remembers even when cognitively we have forgotten. Even a person who has walked a route many times may still not be able to give an accurate or even coherent account of it. This fact has important implication for therapy. When we are doing verbal therapy and depending upon the client's account of what happens in their life, we may only be getting the client's rationalization. If we get the client to re-enact what they are talking about, all sorts of details may become apparent which were absent from the verbal account. The whole tenor of what is presented may be different. This phenomenon is also true of therapists as well as clients, of course. Ask a therapist to describe a client to you and then ask the same therapist to role play this client and you may have difficulty believing that it is the same client being represented.

We can say, therefore, that there are many things which the body knows which the head ignores or has not realized yet. The work of therapy may sometimes be to make these connections. Phenomenological therapy may, therefore, sometimes be about finding words to go with things. Sometimes, however, the experience itself is enough. If I know how to find the shop I want in a strange town, it may be unnecessary for me to be able to describe the route to a stranger or even to myself. That I can do it is enough. Similarly, a client who finds that their confidence has increased, who now feels able to do things which previously defeated them, does not necessarily need to know rationally how or why this transformation occurred. The experience is enough.

What happens in therapy is that a person's perception of their life shifts. It is essential to this process that the therapist is able to keep the client in dialogue without, at the same time, getting in the way. Responses which reify the client's perceptions get in the way. To reify means to make something which is abstract or tentative concrete and fixed. To avoid this the therapist needs a good repertoire of turns of phrase which indicate that what is being said remains tentative. Thus, if the client says "My mother is a cruel person," the therapist does not take this as a statement of fact about the mother, merely a statement about the client's perception of mother. The therapist might answer: "So as you think of her right now, you are aware of what seems like a cruel side of her." Even if the client continues "It is not just one side of her, she's cruel through and through," the therapist is likely to respond something like "You want me to realize just how total her cruelty to you has felt." Even though we do not necessarily continue to use circumlocutory phrases all the time, we should never lose our awareness that the material presented is always the client's perception and not hard fact.

APODICITY

Something which is apodictic is something which is experienced as unquestionably true. The idea of apodicity is extended in phenomenology to cover the fact that experience cannot be undone. Thus, for instance, in the famous gestalt picture of a vase which is also two faces, if we "see" the vase first, we do not experience the faces and may, for a time, be unable to experience them. Once we have "seen" them, however, we can go back and forth between the two different interpretations of the picture at will. We do not go back to being unable to see the faces. Obviously, this principle is not absolutely true because if we do not see the picture again for a very long time and completely forgot about it, we might have to go through the learning process again, but, as a general principle it holds that we cannot go back.

Now, this principle applies on a larger scale in life as a whole. Once one has had sexual intercourse, one cannot go back to innocence in this respect. Once one has grown up, one cannot really go back to being a child. Once one has left the womb, one cannot return. Once one's spouse has confessed to an infidelity, one cannot go back to believing them incapable of such a thing. Experience does not so much propel us forward as prevent us going back.

Commonly, clients come to therapy holding a perceptual set about their lives which evolved at some earlier period of their history. They implicitly expect that this perceptual set will fit the therapy encounter too. This is the phenomenon known in other therapies as "transference". In all probability, the experience which they have of the encounter with the therapist will not match their expectations. For instance, if the client had parents who did not care about him, he will be looking for signs that the therapist does not care about him either. Whether this client makes progress will probably depend upon whether some incident occurs in the course of the therapy which gives him conviction that the therapist does in fact care. If it becomes apodictic to the client that the therapist cares, it will no longer be possible for him to go back to the position he was in before. We could rationalize this by saying that it will no longer be possible for him to believe that he is unloveable because he has achieved conviction that somebody does cherish him.

Now, whether or not something does happen which gives the client such an experience is not something which can readily be achieved by deliberate planning. It is essential, however, that the therapist conduct the therapy in such a way that such experiences remain possible. When something like this occurs we may speak of a "therapeutic moment" or of "realization".

One might at first think that what is said here about apodicity and what has been said about the primacy of perception are in conflict with each other but this is not so. What one knows apodictically is that such and such a perception is possible. One never knows for sure whether that or any other perception faithfully represents the "real world".

ATTENTION AND PHENOMENAL FIELDS

Not all of our world is available to perception simultaneously. At any one time our attention is focused somewhere. "Consciousness is always consciousness of something" (Husserl 1929/1985, p. 13). Our consciousness at any one time, therefore, is actually defined by its object. This implies, in effect, that our lives are given definition by the way we direct our attention, or, we could say, by our projects.

It makes a great deal of difference to our state of mind what is occupying our attention. When we look at one aspect of life we feel good, when we look at another we feel bad. It thus makes quite a lot of difference to the therapy process what fields of view are regarded as legitimate for inspection in the session. Some therapists, for instance, have been concerned to focus the client's attention upon the past (eg Freud), some upon the present (eg Perls), and some on the future (eg Satir).

The phenomenal field is the general area toward which the person is directing attention. It constitutes the background for what will become the central focus. The edge of such a field constitutes a horizon of awareness. Generally such horizons are open, in the sense that a person can shift their attention elsewhere at will. We all do experience times, however, when our attention seems fixated upon a single perspective, when our horizons have become boundaries. The therapy dialogue often serves to loosen some of these fixities.

In considering the therapy situation it is also useful to consider the phenomenology of the client-therapist encounter as divisible into several fields, attention to each of which leads the therapist to a different style of response. Thus, the field which therapy in commonly concerned with is that which is only directly perceptible by the client. The client, as it were, looks into his inner world and reports what he sees there to the therapist. The therapist thus only has an indirect view of this material. To build up an accurate picture of this field, the therapist is dependent upon the client's account and she must, therefore, use her imagination. The style of response the therapist makes when the dialogue is focused upon the client's inner life, is called an empathic reflection.

The client's inner world is not, however, the only source of perceptions for the therapist. There is also, the appearance of the client here present in the room. This presence constitutes a second field of attention. The client's appearance and body language often reveals more important information than the words which the client says because they are manifest signs of what the client is experiencing. We have already established that experience precedes verbalization. Noticing the client's body language gives us clues to things which the client has not yet formulated in words. Drawing attention to body language often helps the client to formulate impressions more quickly or to make connections which would otherwise have been over-looked completely.

Thirdly, in addition to the client's presence and the client's inner world, there is a further phenomenal field constituted by the therapist's own inner reactions. This is directly perceptible to the therapist but not to the client. If the therapist has been attending carefully to the client, however, then because attention defines consciousness, the therapist's own inner state will resonate with what he has picked up from the client. When the therapist, as it were, looks inside himself and then reveals what he finds there, we call this kind of contribution congruence. More of this below.

Finally, we may say that in the process of therapy, client and therapist tend to gradually construct a shared world out of the various contributions which they have each made to their relationship. This shared world is the stuff that relationships are made of. It can be very rich. It provides both a bond between the two people and a resource from which each can draw when they are together. Phenomenological therapy is constructivist. It is not just a matter of receiving what the client has to reveal. It is also a process in which something new comes into being, in which a co-creative process takes place in which both therapist and client share.

INNER AND OUTER SPACE

In common speech we tend to refer to those things which the client knows but to which others are not privy as the client's "inner" world. This is a useful convention of speech. It is, however, also rather misleading because phenomenologically hardly any of the client's so-called inner world is experienced by the client as being inside her. Rather it is experienced or perceived as being all around her. This topic is explored in more depth in the paper Eigenwelt and Mitwelt (EI Paper 20).

The sense we have of what is inside ourselves and what is outside is constantly shifting. Thus, if I am wrestling with someone, I am very aware of my arm as part of me and the other person's arms as part of him. On the other hand, if my arm is injured in the fight, I may then say that my arm is giving me trouble, as though the arm is now another party. And if my arm has to be amputated, I will probably say that I have lost part of myself, but I will also probably add that I am no less a person for that. Inner and outer are thus constantly changing.

The way this works has a great deal to do with the way the imagination is being used at any one moment. Naively we might suppose that the world is just "there" and that we receive information about it through our senses in a relatively passive way. This seems, however, to be not at all the case. It is closer to the truth to say that we each have a highly elaborated and detailed sense of our world and that we spend our time testing out our mental "models" against experience. Most of what we perceive, therefore, is not really what is actually there but what we presume to be there. It can be a great shock to the system when something happens which demonstrates that something is not how we presumed that it would be. When, for instance, a part of our world is taken away, it takes time for us to stop imagining the lost part to still be there. The powerful emotions we experience at such a time are called grief.

It is important for the therapist to tune in to the client's sense of space. Phenomenology is all about perspectives and angles. Actually, realness is a sense we have about something when we have experienced it from a number of different angles or in a number of different contexts. Either metaphorically or literally we have to walk around things before we get a sense of them as existing, before we give them a place in our personal life space.

This is true of all the objects we encounter, including ourselves. It might seem odd to think about ourselves as one of our objects, but we do, in fact, glean a lot of perceptions of ourselves from the feedback we get to our actions. Our sense of ourselves is built up out of our various encounters with ourselves. When a young person moves away from home and starts to see himself in a variety of new situations, he tries to fathom what it is that is constant about himself in each of these contexts and thereby builds up a sense of himself as somebody.

Each person, then, has a personal world (eigenwelt) which is spatially organized. When the client talks, you will often see the head and direction of gaze move giving clues to where in space the client positions the things being talked about, home here, childhood there, employment in another direction. Tuning in to this spatial organization can improve our empathy markedly and ease communication. Sometimes it is enough just to gesture in a particular direction to put the client in touch with a whole constellation of meanings.

Not only direction, but also distance is important. The terms close and distant are used to describe proximity in space and also to characterize warmth of relationship. We say, "He was very distant with me," or, "We are a close family." Also, we can talk about distancing ourselves from what we are talking about. A client can be under-distanced or over-distanced from their life just as an audience in a theatre can be over or under-distanced from the drama unfolding on the stage (Scheff 1979). Getting the distancing right seems to be essential to the achievement of catharsis.

ALTERED STATES AND ALTERNATIVE WORLDS

When we understand that a large part of our perception of our world is actually presumption rather than observation, we can see that a good deal of the time most people are in varying degrees of reverie. This becomes obvious to most of us when we think about our journey to work each morning. We perhaps drive a car a considerable distance and arrive with no real recollection of the journey at all. We have been on "automatic pilot" the whole way. Altered states of consciousness are thus an everyday affair. Most of the time we are in some degree of mild trance.

The altered state which we all know something about is sleep. There are several different states covered by the term sleep and these can be distinguished by measuring the activity of the brain. Dreaming only occurs during one phase of sleep, called REM sleep. When we dream we sometimes have the realization that the dream we are dreaming is continuous with other dreams we have had in the past. We may realize this even though we have never remembered any of these dreams while awake. This illustrates the fact that different states can carry different histories and different perceptual presumptions.

This is an important fact for therapy. A client may only be able to access certain information when in a particular state. All therapists, not just hypnotists, use techniques which help clients to access altered states of consciousness. A phenomenological therapist will gradually acquire a repertoire of different ways of helping clients in this way. Most of these methods are not particularly esoteric. Empathic listening helps a story-teller get absorbed in his tale. The use of evocative language helps the other person to get into reliving a sequence of events. Dramatic enactment often results in participants forgetting that others are present as they become lost in the plot. There are many other methods (see EI Paper 9).

The accessing of altered states generally involves some degree of regression. Much therapy is concerned with revisiting times past. There is a great deal of difference, however, between recounting a known history and imaginatively reliving the events. The methods used in psychodrama are largely concerned with helping clients to achieve the latter.

Altered states are not entirely about going back in time, however. It is an important phenomenological principle that the ordinary state that most people spend most of their time in is one which is actually detached from reality. Phenomenology came into existence as an attempt to clear our vision of the world, to achieve direct perception of "the things themselves". This approach is echoed in Buddhist psychology which views the state of the ordinary person as one of delusion. This delusive state is one in which the person unwittingly invests a large part of his energy in trying not to see things as they are.

We have already seen how we spend a lot of the time trying to get our inner model of the world into line with the models held by those around us. Each culture thus builds up its own "natural attitude". To live in the natural attitude, however, is to live in a world which is constructed by convention rather than experience. Most of the time we are simply not in touch with the world around us. Sustaining the natural attitude takes energy and is stressful. This is one reason why contact with the natural world is therapeutic. Taking holidays also enables many people to let the normal mask slip and it is for this reason that while holidays are restorative for many people, they are also a time when established patterns of relationships can come undone. We see the same phenomenon in even stronger form in religious retreats. Mahomet, Jesus and the Buddha all had their revelations and enlightenments when they had taken leave of other people and gone off into the desert or into the forest on their own. They were then separated from the constant reminders of conventional thinking, which the company of others provides, which prevent us from experiencing new revelations.

Work with a phenomenological therapist should be rather like being on such a retreat in that the therapist acts as a mirror rather than as a reinforcement for a particular view-point. The therapist's neutrality throws the client into a reevaluation of all values in the course of which she must find her own truth. In order to change a person has to let go of the past and this often requires a degree of isolation from it. This can be provided by the therapy situation in which the therapist's attitude creates, as it were, a bubble of safety within which the client can look anew.

EMPATHY AS REALIZATION

To preserve this safety, therefore, a basic rule of therapy is never to criticise the client. If one feels critical of a client, one should examine this feeling very carefully to see how it has arisen and try to see what it is that one is missing in one's understanding of them. To escape from the habit of criticism, one might consider whether one can be entirely confident that if you had been born as them, with their body, their parents, their life chances and so on, can you be entirely confident that you would not now be thinking, feeling and acting exactly as they do. In other words, the opposite of criticism is the ability to put oneself in the other person's shoes, to appreciate how the world seems from where they stand. This ability is called empathy. In all phenomenological therapies it plays a central role and especially in the form of therapy evolved by Carl Rogers called client-centred therapy (Rogers 1951).

Empathy is to understand the other person's perception of the world as though you were them but without ever losing touch with the fact that it is their perception and not yours. Empathy is firstly a skill. We can learn to get better and better at understanding the viewpoints of others. Empathy is also a basic quality of our lives (EI Paper 24). We have a capacity for seeing the world not just as it appears to us but also for appreciating how it seems to the other person. Empathy is a means by which we expand our own awareness.

When we are first learning therapy we tend to try to understand what the client tells us and to make sense of it as information. Depth of contact, however, depends upon achieving a real experience of what the other person feels. This is another aspect of apodicity. I may have heard my client say many times that she is frightened to go outside of her house and I may have registered this as information in my memory, yet I may still not have truly realized what my client means. Simply mentally labeling the client as an agoraphobic advances the therapy not one whit. Then, one day, she may tell me it again in a way which somehow enables me to get a genuinely felt experience myself of the terror she feels in this regard. Suddenly I know what she is talking about in a quite different way. While we hold something just as information, it does not penetrate very far into our awareness, because information is always open to doubt. Real knowing involves an experience. Therapeutic moments may thus occur as a realization by the client or by the therapist. At best, they are points of mutual recognition in which the client and therapist both become aware that something important has happened between them.

Empathy occurs when the client's "inner" life becomes real to the therapist. This means first tuning in to it, then getting to be able to move about within it, then finally having a sense of deep recognition of the person.

Empathy, as a concept, shades off on one side into pity and on the other side into identification. Pity is feeling sorry for the person. It is common for the therapist to be moved by what the client recounts and this may give rise to feelings of sorrow or even anger on the client's behalf. When such feelings arise naturally, there is no reason why the therapist should hide them. On the other hand, pity is different from empathy and does carry a danger of slipping over into condescension from the therapist's side and may provoke irritation or, alternatively, encourage an inappropriate degree of dependency on the part of the client. Similarly, identification may seem like empathy at first but is significantly different from it in its effects. A degree of temporary identification is necessary in order to generate the empathic perceptual shift. Identification becomes a problem when we then become attached to the position now adopted. Thus the client may feel hurt by a member of his family. The therapist must imaginatively identify with the client enough to get a sense of what that must feel like. If, however, the therapist herself now starts to genuinely dislike this other family member (whom she has never actually met), identification has gone too far.

Identification is a serious pitfall in therapy. Clients who have similar view to ourselves may be easy to sympathize with, but, for that very reason, it may be difficult for us to make real progress with them. This is because we tend simply to reinforce their prejudices which match our own. We have what feels like a very comfortable relationship with the client in which we see eye to eye on many things, but nothing in the client's life changes.

DESCRIPTION, EQUALIZATION AND DESCRIPTIVE CHALLENGE

The basis of phenomenological method is description (Spinelli 1989). Phenomenology proceeds by description rather than explanation. It is much more concerned with "what" and "how" than with "why". The client tells the therapist about her life and the therapist describes what he thinks he has understood. The client then corrects and adds to the therapist's description. He revises his description. This is the basis of communication.

Communication is the attempt to get the other person to know what you have in mind or to understand what they have in mind. Since most of us are not psychic, we do this by a process of shaping up. If I say "an animal", you may picture a cat. If I now say it has hooves, your picture may get revised into a horse. If I say that I rode it in Algeria, you may start wondering about a camel.

One thing which is interesting about this illustration using animals is that the listener always has a complete picture. This is a basic gestalt principle. When I get information which does not fit the picture I am building up, I either resist this information in order to hang onto my picture, or I redraw my picture completely. To do this requires a willingness on the part of the listener. Much communication is distorted by the listeners unwillingness to let go of a picture already constructed. Between enemies, for instance, no matter what the other side say, we will find some way of twisting it to fit in with the picture we have of them as nasty people. Therapists, therefore, have to be uncommonly willing to allow their picture of things to be changed by new information emanating from the encounter with the client. This is one of the most important skills.

Primarily, in the therapeutic dialogue, the client reveals material and the therapist follows, keeping in step. Once a good rapport has been built up between therapist and client, however, this descriptive process does not have to be one in which the client exclusively leads. Once material has been given by the client and described by the therapist to the client's satisfaction, it has, in a sense, become common property to the two of them. At this stage, it becomes possible for creativity to enter into the process.

What can happen now is that therapist and client together can "play" with the material. This may involve generating metaphors which can then be extended or mutated (Cox & Theilgaard 1987). Both parties are, at this stage, contributing to the building of new images. Some of this work is done in a purely experimental way. Essentially it is an artistic activity. Many different media of expression can be used in this work. Sometimes the client generates a series of images, sometimes the therapist contributes. What is important at this stage is that the work be carried along by a spirit of free improvisation and spontaneity and what should be avoided is any attempt by the therapist to manipulate the client toward a particular desired outcome.

As the work continues, it can become apparent to the therapist that much of what has been described points in a particular direction. This may also become apparent to the client. Careful description does not just reaffirm what is already known, it reveals gaps which challenge the client in a natural way. The therapist is thus concerned with specific description and with the ways in which the client is uniquely themselves. The therapist is not concerned to draw generalizations from what the client says but is trying to understand with as much accuracy as possible just how it is for this one person. Therapists need a good vocabulary.

Also, when we describe something, we are involved with it. The description makes a difference. The quality of description affects the hearers attitude. If therapists use sterile or overly technical language, the client will be unmoved and however accurate what is said may be, it will not do justice to what is being presented. Jung, for instance, in his later career, discovered that it made a great deal of difference whether you described the client's life in a way which made it sound like a cosmic drama drawn from mythology or one which made it sound like a case study in a medical textbook. Therapy requires poetry.

RESONANCE, CONGRUENCE AND FELT SENSE

The therapist needs to get into the spirit of the client's life in a way which infuses energy into it. This means that the therapist must use imagination and allow herself to inwardly resonate with what the client is presenting.

The inner experience of the therapist is a precious resource. It seems to be the case that communication operates at many levels. The part of communication which takes place out of our awareness may be called resonance. If the client is feeling something but is not overtly expressing it, the therapist may start to feel in himself the very thing that the client is not sharing.

Thus, a therapist might suddenly realize that he has been feeling quite irritated. If the therapist is inexperienced he might, at this point, conclude that this is an irritating client and start to withdraw psychologically or become critical which will not help the therapy. The more experienced therapist will realize that this feeling of irritation probably has something to do with the inter-personal process and will share it simply as information: "I notice that I have started to feel irritated - I'm not sure what about." This type of sharing quite frequently triggers the client to express something not revealed up to that point, perhaps: "There is so much anger inside me." This type of interaction can have a considerable releasing effect upon communication between therapist and client. It gives the client permission to reveal sentiments which might otherwise have remained hidden and it frees the therapist from being controlled or blocked by feelings which might otherwise have remained as obstacles to empathy.

Self revelation in this way is called congruence. To be congruent means that what we express is genuinely in tune with what we inwardly feel. It would not be congruent, for instance, to keep looking interested if one actually felt bored. Congruence may be explicit or implicit. Implicit congruence means genuineness: if one shows caring toward the client it is because one does actually care. Explicit congruence means that one describes one's inner state, eg "I notice that I am feeling sad" or "An image has just come into my mind, let me describe it..."

It is important to be clear what is not meant by this concept. Congruence does not mean telling the client one's own opinions or one's own history. The latter would be called sharing. The former, stating one's opinions, is rarely appropriate in therapy because it invites a transformation of the dialogue from therapy into debate which is something completely different. Sharing is sometimes appropriate but it also has considerable pitfalls attached including the danger that the client will henceforth be careful what he tells you for fear of touching on your issues. Congruence, as the term is being used here, refers to the therapist's inner reaction to the client as it occurs in the therapy session.

Four concepts closely related to congruence are transparency, immediacy, authenticity and spontaneity. Transparency means that one's feelings are openly apparent to the other person. Immediacy means that one responds in the moment without deliberation. Authenticity means that one is the author of one's own life drama. Spontaneity means that what is revealed has arisen new and fresh and constitutes a new response to a situation, something which is not already part of one's established repertoire. These are all qualities which can enhance the therapy process.

The attempt to achieve congruence is one of the driving forces of therapy and of human psychological development in general. The client is trying to make sense of her experience of life and a major part of this work is a matter of examining her confusion, ie the incongruence between different feelings. People commonly hold several feelings about a subject simultaneously. This may constitute an uncomfortable ambivalence or simply be part of the richness of a many faceted personality.

The appearance of incongruence or ambivalence tends to be a trigger for the therapist to respond. If the client says "I feel miserable," but is smiling, then there is something more to be understood. As we grow we become more complex and we also come to appreciate our own complexity more. The therapist seeks to fully appreciate the complexity of the client.

New developments in our lives generally begin as a vaguely felt sense, generally somewhere in our bodies. If we are to grow as people it is necessary for us to pay attention to this "felt sense" and help it to emerge into full awareness. Eugene Gendlin (1981) has evolved a method for working with the felt sense which he describes in his book Focusing. Commonly we overlook or deny many such feelings because they do not readily fit in with our presumptions. However, "when a previously denied feeling is experienced in a full and complete way, in expression and in awareness, and is experienced acceptantly, not as something wrong or bad, a fundamental change occurs" (Rogers 1980, p.224). Rogers believed that personality growth consisted of an accumulation of such changes.

ACCEPTANCE AND POSITIVE REGARD

Everything that has been said so far could be summarized by saying that the therapist accepts and appreciates the client exactly as he is. The great paradox of therapy is that people change and grow most when one is no longer trying to get them to change and grow but is simply trying to understand them as they already are. This is because change and growth are things that happen naturally not things which have to be made to happen. What is needed is not so much cleverness as trust. Again and again in therapy we remind ourselves to trust the process.

The bracketing of presumptions by the therapist creates a psychological space in which the client can expand. This is in many ways the same as the way a good parent appreciates whatever the child does and always finds something delightful in it. As therapists, we cherish our clients. We regard the client as a supremely important person.

The phenomenological epoche means that we are unconditional. To achieve this we have to examine ourselves carefully. We have to see whether we are not actually implicitly communicating to the client that we will approve of them only so long as.... (fill in your own blank): So long as they are our kind of people; So long as they make us feel like effective therapists; So long as they are not sexist, racist, militant, left wing, right wing or whatever; So long as they show improvement; So long as they arrive on time; etc.

To achieve this kind of unconditionality completely is probably impossible and is certainly a lifetimes work. It is important, however, that we know the direction and that we make a beginning and each client we see will probably find some way of revealing to us how we have stopped being unconditional and this will give us another opportunity to grow ourselves. The process of therapy can very commonly be seen to have been one in which the way the client is raises contradictions in the therapist who then has to resolve them in herself before the therapy reaches a satisfactory conclusion. Noticing that our regard for the client has become less than wholly positive is always a good indicator that there is something we need to do about ourselves.

The beginning therapist will say at this point, "But what if I do not like the client?" Perhaps here we have to remember that we can love someone without necessarily liking them. The client may have completely different values from myself, but if I am to work effectively with her I must find a way of respecting her position and cherishing her as a precious human being, as one who reveals to me a different window onto the world, as one who can teach me a different perspective.

The importance of the principle of positive regard can hardly be stressed too strongly. So much of one's communication is a matter of body language and spontaneous reactions that if one is not positively disposed toward the client it will invariably be detected at some level. Equally, if one's regard for the client is such that one prizes them and appreciates them as they are, then the contact one has will tend to be therapeutic even if one makes technical mistakes.

Another point to be made about positive regard is that it has nothing to do with agreeing with the client. The therapist neither agrees nor disagrees with the client. The therapist simply appreciates the client's journey. The therapist is like an old hand at travelling who is listening appreciatively to the stories of another explorer whom he respects. The speaker may not have been to the same territory as oneself: so much the better. If the speaker has covered similar ground to the listener, then the listener must beware and make sure that he still is listening to the speaker and not simply going over his own experience.

EXCHANGE OF SELF AND OTHER

From the very beginning of our lives we are involved with others. Some creatures just hatch out and get on with life but humans are involved with others from the very start. The exchanges that go on between mother and newborn lead on to ever increasing complexity of patterns of social relating. Western psychology has tended to stress what we get from these interactions, rather to the neglect of what we give. Giving and getting, however, are all part of the same process.

When people are cut off from others they suffer. Psychological isolation is one of the most difficult things for humans to deal with. When the good things we offer are not received by others, we are inclined to despair. Suicide generally only occurs in situations where a person believes that it would not really make any difference to anyone else living whether they are alive or not, and situations in which a person feels so dishonoured that they cannot face (ie reconnect with) the people who matter to them. Humans are social.

Psychological growth is largely a product of coming to appreciate the viewpoints of others. Human communication is largely concerned with this process. As we grow up we take on a variety of different roles which are not simply invented by ourselves but involve us in taking on parts which have been evolved by others. By playing many different roles we come to see the world from many different angles. The more angles we see the more possibilities occur to us. Experience is enriched by role taking and role reversal. This process of exchanging self and other is also called play. Children are always playing at being doctors, nurses, space people, soldiers, parents or whoever else appears in their world. They want to try on the other parts for size. It is by getting the feel of the world from different perspectives that we grow, that our minds and hearts expand.

Phenomenology reveals just how important this process of understanding the world from all angles is. Only then does it become real for us in experience.

For therapists this ability to understand the other person's view point is particularly essential. And insofar as we become accomplished at seeing the world from many different viewpoints, not only do we become more skilled and helpful therapists, we also grow as people.

Clients too need new perspectives on life. Commonly, however, they have become blocked from obtaining them in some way. A client may say that he is always appreciating other people's needs and it is time someone listened to him for a change. An unwillingness to see other viewpoints has arisen. When people do not feel heard by others, they tend to become closed. There is, of course, a paradox here, a downward spiral. The client who is self-preoccupied does not get engaged with the world and so becomes more self-preoccupied. It is usually useless, in such cases, telling the person to concern themselves with others. Nonetheless, if the therapist listens to the client and puts herself in the client's shoes, as it were, connections will gradually be established which will lift the client out of their isolation in a natural way.

Role reversal has been developed as a distinct therapeutic method by Jacob Moreno (1977-85) who made it one of the central techniques of psychodrama. It is remarkable to see how a person who is engaged in dialogue with another is able to access quite different information when playing one role as compared with playing another. As we change role our experience changes. The protagonist in a psychodrama sits facing a group member in role as the protagonist's father. The protagonist asks: "Did you despise me?". The groupworker asks the protagonist to reverse roles and become the father. As father, the protagonist is able to reply: "No, really, I was secretly proud of you." As father, the protagonist may often speak with a sense of certainty about things which, as self, he did not know.

From the example just given, we see that role taking involves entering a slightly altered state of consciousness. In role, we are in some degree entranced. In this state we experience the world differently and access different memories, different angles on life.

Role reversal, either using drama or simply by imaginative identification, is a very useful training method for therapists. The more one is able to enter into the spirit of other people's lives, the more effective a therapist one is likely to be and the greater the range of clients one will be able to work with.

THERAPY AS PATH

If we accept that therapy is a process of enrichment of experiencing whereby a person finds new perspectives on life and so is able to rise above obstacles and setbacks, then we can see that in the therapy process enrichment is going on both for the client and for the therapist. Phenomenology suggests that becoming empathic with another person enables one to grow. A phenomenological approach suggests that there is a much greater degree of mutuality in the therapy process than is generally acknowledged.

It is common to think of therapy as a situation in which a person who is already sorted out (the therapist) helps someone who is not (the client). Phenomenology implies, however, that therapist and client are engaged in essentially similar paths and that all that differs is the role that they are temporarily taking in relation to one another.

Every piece of therapy challenges the therapist to grow. This growth is not linear but branches out in all directions. It is not that the therapist is "ahead" of the client, simply that therapist and client start off in different positions with correspondingly different perspectives. The therapist tries to set her existing self aside (bracketing) in order to, as it were, go to where the client is starting from. Insofar as she is able to do so she gains something new. The client, now feeling accompanied rather than opposed, becomes more willing to look around and explore the landscape. As he does so, he begins to recover some old ground and notice some new things and communicate these to the therapist. Now both are gaining new views of life.

Being in therapy and doing therapy are both expanding activities. If we like we may say that they constitute a spiritual path, a way of transcending our old selves. A spiritual path is characterised by effort, reflection, compassion and wisdom. All these characteristics are to be found as central components of the therapist's approach and the client's progress.

Therapist and client together make an effort to focus their attention carefully upon the material arising for the client. They reflect together upon it in a wide variety of ways. All of this occurs in an ambience of caring, trust and positive regard. And from it there arises an enhanced awareness, a repertoire of wise ways of becoming involved in life.

Introspective and meditative methods can help the therapist achieve the kind of inner peacefulness which enables him or her to take this difficult journey into the unknown reaches of human nature. Expressive, creative and artistic methods can help us free ourselves from inhibitions and learn to move with the flow of the work. Training to become a therapist is a matter of cultivating both the inward looking and the outward looking aspects of our experience, of enriching our own perception in as many dimensions as possible.

CONCLUSION

I have reviewed some of the key concepts of phenomenological therapy. I hope I have conveyed that while these do offer a coherent system of thought about therapy, they do not constitute a straight-jacket. Phenomenology alerts us to the subjective dimension of lives, both our own and other people's. It calls us to appreciate the diversity and richness which becomes available when people start to look into the things which concern them personally. It erodes the divisions between therapy, education, art and spirituality. It helps us to establish a pattern of links between all aspects of creative activity.

I hope I have sketched a picture of therapy which challenges us to each become the most we can possibly be and to do so through involvement with others and with the natural world of which we are a part. I have tried to make some of the philosophical language of this approach accessible and usable.

Phenomenologists have generally tended to see the therapy relationship as simply a special case of good human relations in general. Therapy has its roles and conventions but these do not define its essence. One can sit and listen to a client ad nauseam and get nowhere if one does not find a willingness within oneself to really enter into the world of the other, appreciating it as it is.

This paper is only an introduction. My recommendation to the reader now is both to see how these concepts can be put to practical effect in work with clients and in our own personal growth, and to go further into what they mean both by studying the works of leading writers and by examining our own experience in detail. The phenomenal world is infinitely rich.

REFERENCES

Eigenwelt Interskill Occasional Papers:
EI Paper 3: BRAZIER D. 1991. Phenomenology in Counselling and Psychotherapy.
EI Paper 9: BRAZIER D. 1992. Our Many Lives.
EI Paper 20: BRAZIER D. 1992. Eigenwelt and Mitwelt.
EI Paper 24: BRAZIER D. 1993. Empathy.
EI Paper 26: BRAZIER D. 1993. Therapy for a Small Planet.

Other references:
COX M. & THEILGAARD A. 1987. Mutative Metaphors in Psychotherapy. London: Tavistock
GENDLIN E.T. 1981. Focusing. New York: Bantam*
HUSSERL E. 1929. The Paris Lectures. Hague: Martinus Nijhoff*
MACY J. 1991. World as Lover, World as Self. Berkeley: Parallax Press*
MORENO J.L. 1977 & 1985. Psychodrama, volumes 1,2 & 3. Beacon, New York: Beacon House*
PASSONS W.R. 1975. Gestalt Approaches to Counselling. London: Holt, Rinehart & Winston*
SCHEFF T.J. 1979. Catharsis in Healing, Ritual and Drama. Berkeley: University of California Press*
SPINELLI E. 1989. The Interpreted World. London: Sage*
ROGERS C.R. 1951. Client-centered Therapy. London: Constable*
ROGERS C.R. 1980. A Way of Being. Boston: Houghton Mifflin*

Dh.D.J. Brazier
1993