Project Description
This handout crystallises the essential tension inherent in the therapeutic position, between: 'I-it' object-relating (which can be both deeply healing and deeply wounding) on the one hand, and dialogical 'I-I' subject-relating (which can be both deeply healing and deeply wounding) on the other. The implication is that either perspective usually gets absolutised into the assumed 'essence' or 'bottomline' of therapy, resulting in fixed and dogmatic stances and habitual therapeutic positions, whereas here I am trying to define the therapeutic position precisely as the dynamic tension between them. It is by not allowing myself to be reduced to one or the other (relationally or theoretically), but by inhabiting an impossible third position that the therapeutic space becomes both an enactment of the client's unconscious realities as well as a possible transformation of those realities. This impossible third position must be paradoxical because it recognises and maintains the simultaneous 'truth' and validity of both opposing perspectives.
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