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Abstract

This article is a distillation of Maurice Friedman's book The Healing Dialogue in Psychotherapy (1985). With almost no reference to the first, historical part of the book, the article brings together the second, topical part into a compact whole, which isn't done in the book itself. The first section of the article makes explicit the link between philosophy and psychotherapy through a section on "Philosophical Anthropology and the Ontology of the Between." The ontology of the between is the groundwork for that "healing through meeting" (second section) that arises when the meeting between therapist and client is seen as central rather than ancillary. In the third section ("The Unconscious and Dreams"), the unconscious is seen as that personal wholeness that underlies the ever-new elaboration into physical and psychic, outer and inner. Dreams, in consequence, are not raw material of the unconscious but a product of the mixture of unconscious and conscious and of the meeting of the therapist and patient. Existential or real guilt (fourth section), similarly, is a reality of relationship that must be addressed within healing through meeting, and confirmation (fifth section) becomes the decisive key to the development of the person, the origin of psychopathology, and such healing as therapy makes possible. Confirmation in therapy is made possible through what Martin Buber calls "inclusion," or imagining the real, and "making the other present," which induces the inmost growth of the self. Inclusion is different from both empathy and identification in that it is bipolar, remaining on one's own ground while swinging toward the other. The last section of the article expands confirmation into that "dialogue of touchstones" in which the therapist helps the client overcome the impossible choice between alienating everyone through expressing his touchstones of reality and pseudo belonging to the community through suppressing his touchstones. This can be accomplished only in an atmosphere of trust, which includes the confirmation of the otherness and uniqueness of the client.

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