Learning from Experience

1 Introduction

MY GOAL IN THIS VOLUME is to talk about the difficult process in which we are all engaged: that of discovering ourselves as human beings. Because of the context, we can talk in terms of becoming therapists, but we need to keep in mind that we have just moved up a register—the basic process is one of becoming ourselves.

These goals are quite similar. In my mind, they overlap because I see the quintessential task of the clinician as one of coming to know himself or herself sufficiently to be able to register the experience of the other in progressively more profound and also more useful ways.

This process begins with our own discomfort at finding ourselves sitting in the chair that has somehow become designated as that of "the authority": ...