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C 2002) Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring 2002 (°
In Experiential Sessions, There Is No Therapist or Client: There Is a “Teacher” and a “Practitioner” Alvin R. Mahrer
In virtually every kind of psychotherapy, therapist and client attend mainly to one another throughout almost the entire session. If each experiential session is to be successful in enabling the person to become the whole new person that the person can become, and to become free of the painful feeling in the painful situation, the radical alternative is for the experiential teacher–therapist and the person to attend mainly to the “third thing” that is the important center of attention for the person. An even more radical glimpse into the future includes the person having one’s own sessions by oneself, complemented by skill-development sessions with the experiential teacher. KEY WORDS: therapist–client relationship; experiential therapist; experiential psychotherapy.
The purpose is to introduce a rather radical alternative to the traditional therapist-client realtionship and then, at the end of the article, to take a giant step toward an even more radical extension into the future of experiential “practitioners” having sessions by themselves, followed by training sessions in which experiential “teachers” show the “practitioners” how to become increasingly proficient. A RADICAL ALTERNATIVE TO THE TRADITIONAL THERAPIST–CLIENT RELATIONSHIP Picture an experiential session (Mahrer, 1989, 1996) in which there are two people in chairs that are facing in the same direction, right next to one another. Both people have their eyes closed throughout the session. Both people are attending mainly to a scene of strong feeling, rather than mainly on one another in ordinary conversation. Address correspondence to Alvin R. Mahrer, Ph.D., School of Psychology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada K1N 6N5; e-mail:
[email protected]. 71 C 2002 Human Sciences Press, Inc. 0022-0116/02/0300-0071/0 °
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The main purpose of this article is to show how their way of being with one another is (a) a radical departure from and alternative to the traditional therapistclient relationship, and (b) superior to the traditional therapist-client relationship in helping to attain the goals of an experiential session. AN EVEN MORE RADICAL EXTENSION INTO THE FUTURE OF EXPERIENTIAL SESSIONS Picture an experiential session in which a “practitioner” is having an experiential session by oneself (Mahrer, 2000, 2002). The session is recorded and, following the session, the “practitioner” and the experiential “teacher” study the recording so that the practitioner is able to learn how to carry out a session better and better. The practitioner then returns to the room and continues alternating between having a session and continuing learning the skills from the teacher. The aim is for the practitioner to become increasingly proficient at having one’s own experiential sessions. A glimpse into this even more radical extension will be given at the end of this article. IN THE TRADITIONAL THERAPIST–CLIENT RELATIONSHIP, THERAPIST AND CLIENT ATTEND MAINLY TO ONE ANOTHER In virtually every kind of psychotherapy, with virtually every kind of client, and in virtually every kind of traditional therapist-client relationship, virtually the entire session consists of therapists and clients attending mainly to one another. This is so common that it is rarely talked about in public. Of course one can look for some likely exceptions such as the client’s talking to an “empty chair” or reporting “free associations”: “So say whatever comes through your mind. Act as though, for instance, you were a traveler sitting next to a window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the changing views which you see outside” (Freud, 1913, p. 135). However, even in saying these words, the therapist is likely attending mainly to the patient, and the patient may well be attending to the therapist in reporting the free floating material. Yes, exceptions can be found, yet psychotherapy is mainly therapists and clients attending mainly to one another throughout the session. A SERIOUS PROBLEM: WHEN THERAPIST AND CLIENT ATTEND MAINLY TO ONE ANOTHER, PSYCHOTHERAPY IS MAINLY A WAY FOR THEM TO HAVE IMPORTANT PERSONAL FEELINGS IN BEING WITH ONE ANOTHER What gives psychotherapy its juice? Why do people become clients and therapists, and spend time being with one another? Perhaps the most professionallyapproved spin is that clients have psychic pain, suffering, distress, mental illnesses,
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disorders, and pathological problems. Clients seek out therapists to gain treatment for those painful states and conditions, and therapists are there to provide professional treatment of those painful states and conditions. However, when therapists and clients are seen from the experiential perspective, we see two people being with one another to undergo important personal feelings (Mahrer, 1989, 1996, 2001c, 2002). The juice, the important thing that gets and keeps these people together, is that each can undergo their own important personal feelings as they are mainly attending to one another during their sessions with one another. When the client and the right therapist are attending mainly to one another, the highlights are those precious moments when the client actually undergoes important personal feelings such as the following: feeling so accepted, understood, listened to; feeling so special, distinctive, unique; feeling so sexually attractive, appealing, stimulating; feeling so sexually aroused, turned on, stimulated; having a most special confidante, best friend, closest buddy; feeling so valued, prized, cherished; feeling so defended, protected, watched over; feeling so reached, made contact with, rescued; feeling so safe, in sanctuary, free of the awful external threats and pressures; feeling so open, honest, transparent; unguarded; feeling so close, intimate, bonded; having someone to trust, lean on, entrust oneself to; having an ally, a defender, someone on my side. These are only some of the preciously important personal feelings that are the precious juice that can make it so precious for the client to be with the right therapist, attending mainly to the therapist. When the therapist and the right kind of client are attending mainly to one another, the therapist is the one who can also have special moments of undergoing important personal feelings such as the following: feeling like a professional of value, of worth, a doctor; feeling needed, wanted, sought after; feeling like the grand provider of personal understanding, empathy, knowing what the other is feeling; feeling like the fountain of wisdom, the sage, the one with special knowledge; feeling sexually attractive, appealing, stimulating; feeling like the caring one, the nurturer, the one who looks after; feeling like the one who offers contact to lost souls, the one who can reach the unreachable, who offers hope to the hopeless; feeling like the rock, the one to be trusted, the one to be depended upon; feeling like the best friend, the confidante, the one who offers closeness and intimacy; the feeling of being the savior, the rescuer, the grand healer. If client and therapist click, if the chemistry is right, if they have their important personal feelings, the relationship tends to continue, for better or for worse. If they do not click, if they do not have their important personal feelings, then it is likely that they will part company, the client continuing the search for the right companion, and the therapist turning to the next client. Therapists and clients attending mainly to one another can be a serious problem, especially for psychotherapists who would like psychotherapy to be much more than a professionally sanctioned “dating service” so that therapists and clients can undergo their important personal feelings.
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ANOTHER SERIOUS PROBLEM: WHEN THERAPIST AND CLIENT ATTEND MAINLY TO ONE ANOTHER, THE EXPERIENTIAL SESSION IS PROBABLY NOT GOING TO BE A SUCCESSFUL SESSION Each experiential session is designed to enable the person to achieve two boldly magnificent changes. One is that the person can achieve a deep-seated qualitative change, a magnificent transformation into becoming the person that the person is capable of becoming. A deeper potentiality or quality is discovered, and the radical qualitative change occurs when that deeper potentiality becomes an integrated part of a whole new person. The related second magnificent change is that the qualitatively new person is free of the pain-laden feelings and the pain-laden situation that were front and center in the beginning of the session. These are the two magnificent goals or changes that are to be achieved in each experiential session. The serious problem is that these two goals or changes will probably not be achieved when therapist and client attend mainly to one another throughout the session. The steps and methods for achieving these two goals or changes are defeated, are prevented from occurring, when therapist and client attend mainly to one another. But there is a solution to these two serious problems: THE SOLUTION: THE EXPERIENTIAL THERAPIST AND THE PERSON ATTEND MAINLY TO THE “THIRD THING” RATHER THAN ATTENDING MAINLY TO ONE ANOTHER Most psychotherapists are convinced that some kind of therapist-client relationship is practically inevitable. It may be a good one or a bad one, important or unimportant, but it is virtually unavoidable. If, however, the “relationship” includes therapist and client attending mainly to one another, then there is a surprisingly viable alternative in which the therapist and the person attend mainly to a “third thing” rather than mainly to one another (cf. Havens, 1986; Mahrer, 1996, 1997; Major & Miller, 1984; May, 1989; Rothenberg, 1987). Here is a promising solution to the two serious problems. How was the solution found, and precisely what was the solution? Start From the Goals and Work Backward to Find the Most Useful Way for the Experiential Therapist and the Person to Be With One Another The solution did not start with “the relationship.” Rather, the solution started from the goals and worked backward by trying to answer these two questions: What are the useful means and methods for the person to undergo a deep-seated qualitative, transformational change? How can the experiential therapist and the person be with one another to achieve those means and methods? For example,
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if one of the “means and methods” is for the person literally to live and be in a scene of strong feeling, then the question is: How can the therapist and the person be with one another so that the person can literally live and be in the scene of strong feeling? The solution was found by starting with the goal, the practical problem, the working task, and working backward to find a solution. The Solution Was in the Way Two People Attend to the Task They Are Working On The solution was found by looking outside the field of psychotherapy for how two people attended to the problem, the job, the task they were working on. Picture two people, perhaps co-workers or with one as instructor, working together to seal the leak in the wall, studying one’s grip on the tennis racket in hitting the forehand, cutting through the muscular tissue in surgery, searching for the error in the series of equations, studying the footprint of the animal they are tracking, disassembling the bomb, showing the flight attendant how to land the airplane, teaching the nursing student how to insert the catheter. The solution was found by noticing how their attention was mainly on the important third thing, on their common task, goal, thing on which they were working, rather than mainly and consistently on one another, which would effectively block their work. The Experiential Teacher Gets Into a Special Position So That What the Person Says and Does Come In, Through, and From the Experiential Teacher One distinctive element in the solution is that the person and the teacher are mainly attending to the important third thing. A second distinctive element is that the teacher and the person are in chairs that are right next to one another, pointing in the same direction, and the teacher and the person have their eyes closed throughout the session. The third distinctive element is that the teacher assumes a position so that what the person says and does are as if they come in, through, and from the teacher. In this special position, the teacher is also the vehicle for what the person is saying and doing. The teacher essentially becomes a part of the person, or the teacher and the person come close to being two beings inside the person. The teacher is so melded into, fused with, or resonating with, the person that the teacher is not in the ordinary outside position to make outside observations about the client, to frame and deliver empathic or interpretive statements, to have a stream of private inferences, to do what most psychotherapists do in the ordinary therapist-client relationship (Mahrer, 1989, 1996, 1997, 2001a; Mahrer, Boulet, & Fairweather, 1994).
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The Experiential Teacher Shows the “Practitioner” What to Do in Going Through the Session In a sense, the experiential therapist is “being” the person, is attending mainly to what the person is attending to, and is positioned so that what the person says and does come in, through, and from the experiential therapist. Yet the experiential therapist is also able to be the teacher because the experiential therapist is “programmed” to proceed through the steps of the session, knows what methods to use, and is skilled in using the methods. The experiential therapist is a teacher who goes through the session with the person and as the person. The person is more of “practitioner” than a “patient” or a “client” in at least two ways: (a) In most therapies, the therapist is the one who delivers or applies the “interventions” or methods onto the patient or client who is the receiver or the object of the therapist’s interventions or methods. In the experiential alternative, it is the person who carries out the experiential methods. The teacher shows the person what to do and how to do it, provided that the person is ready. (b) As the person gradually learns how to carry out the methods, the person becomes more and more the “practitioner” and the teacher-therapist becomes less and less present, especially if the person is drawn toward having one’s own sessions by oneself in the future (Mahrer, 2002). With attention mainly on the “third thing,” either the teacher or the “practitioner” may say, “Now fill in all the details of what is happening—how that person is talking, what she is saying, who else is around, what is happening here, the thoughts going on inside, everything . . . The next thing is to look for times in the past when something like this happened, when this same feeling was going on . . . Keep saying it with more and more feeling, over and over.”
The Solution Solves the Two Serious Problems The experiential solution is that (a) the person’s attention is mainly out there, on the important third thing, the teacher’s attention is likewise mainly on that same third thing, rather than both attending mainly to one another; and (b) the experiential teacher is positioned so that what the person says and does also come in, through, and from the experiential teacher. This is the experiential solution to the serious problem of psychotherapy being mainly a way in which a therapist and a client undergo important personal feelings when they attend mainly to one another throughout the session. This is also the solution to the serious problem of how the experiential teacher and the person can be with one another to maximize the likelihood of achieving the two goals of an experiential session.
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WHAT ARE SOME SPECIAL ADVANTAGES OF THE EXPERIENTIAL ALTERNATIVE? The experiential alternative frees the session of being mainly a way for the traditional therapist and client to have their important personal feelings in the traditional therapist-client relationship. But there are also some additional advantages that are special because (a) they are the nuts and bolts for being able to achieve the two goals of the session; (b) you can achieve these special advantages almost exclusively by means of the experiential alternative; and (c) you will almost certainly be unable to achieve these special advantages in the traditional therapist-client relationship. “Resistance” Is Virtually Eliminated The person is the boss of whether in-session work continues or stops. If the person stops, if the person’s continuing attention is not mainly on the third thing, work automatically stops. When the person stops, the teacher’s work is stopped. The teacher’s “screen” is empty. Work shuts down. When the teacher is attending out there and sees little or nothing, the teacher may say, with attention out there, “Everything stopped. I don’t see anything . . . Maybe we can start again. Maybe not. Should we start again? Yes? No? If you are ready, go ahead. If not, fine, we can stop.” This means that the session may end after 10–15 minutes or so or at any time that the person is ready to pause for a while or end the session, whether this is the initial session or any other session. The person is the boss of whether to go ahead, to pause for a while, or to end the session for today. This means that the ordinary basis for what is ordinarily called “resistance” is essentially missing. For one thing, in order to label whatever the person is doing as resistance, the therapist and client would almost certainly have to be attending mainly to one another. When their attention is mainly on the third thing, the person’s stopping is simply bringing work to a close for a while or for this session. For another thing, the teacher is here to work with the person who is ready and willing to work, that is, to attend mainly to the third thing and to carry out the work. The teacher is not here to fulfill the role of the ordinary psychotherapist who wants the person to be a good client, to be in therapy, who tries to apply treatment to the client, who seeks to change the client, who is in a position to deal with or to talk about or to try to overcome or get around what is ordinarily called “resistance.” Virtually Every Person Can Have Experiential Sessions The experiential alternative means that most people can proceed through a session. This includes far more than people who would ordinarily be labeled as resistant, uncooperative, or unmotivated. People who ordinarily are quiet, or
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controlled, or have few strong feelings, probably can have an experiential session. People who generally have little or nothing to do with psychotherapists probably can have a session. People can probably have a session even if others label them as weird, bizarre, deranged, crazy, mentally ill, psychotic, out of their mind, living in their own world, as having something seriously wrong with them (Mahrer, 2001b). People can have a session even if they and their teacher are different in age, gender, cultural background, religion, nationality, or skin color. People can have a session even if the teacher, unlike the person, is not blind, has not had her parents murdered in front of her very eyes, has never been so big that getting up from a chair is a feat, has never lost both legs, has never had a child who cannot walk, talk, or make scrambled eggs. The Teacher Is Joined With the Person, and Is Virtually Free of the Ordinary Therapist’s Private Inferences and Personal Judgments About the Client When the experiential teacher does a good job of attending mainly to the third thing and of assuming the experiential position of receiving what the person says and does, the teacher is almost exclusively living and being in the scene, and is almost welded onto or fused or joined with the person. The teacher is essentially a part of the living, breathing, experiencing person. This means there is little if any room for the ordinary psychotherapist’s being a separate person in interaction with the client. There is little if any room for the ordinary stream of private hidden thoughts, observations, and inferences about the client. What is set aside is the ordinary therapist’s flow of personal judgements, attitudes, and value-laden opinions about the client. From the viewpoint of the experiential teacher, the ordinary therapist’s private inferences and personal judgements are good things to be free of, as well as their being troublesome interferences and blocks in proceeding through an experiential session. The Teacher Can Actually Feel the Person’s Feelings, and Experience the Person’s Experiencings When the person and the teacher are mainly attending to the third thing, and when the teacher is positioned so that what the person is doing and saying come in, from, and through the teacher, then the teacher is essentially fused or melded with the person, plugged into the person, both inside the same skin. Under these conditions, the magnificent bonus is that the teacher will be able to literally undergo the feeling and experiencing occurring in the person. The feeling and experiencing are occurring simultaneously in both the person and in the teacher. This happens directly, immediately, and virtually automatically when the teacher and the person are doing their jobs. It is like magic.
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The teacher will be undergoing what the person is feeling and experiencing on the surface, and the teacher can also undergo what may be called deeper experiencings far inside the person, experiencings beyond what the person knows, is aware of, may be undergoing on the surface. In other words, the teacher can actually sense, touch, be touched by, undergo the experiencings that are deep inside the person. Here is a sensitive and powerful bonus of the experiential alternative (Mahrer, 1996, 1997; Mahrer, Boulet, & Fairweather, 1994). The Person Can Enter More Deeply Into the Scene, Live and Be In the Scene, Find the Instant of Peak Feeling, and Discover the Deeper Experiencing By following the experiential alternative, the teacher is able to accompany and to guide the person into the inner deeper world, and into discovering the deeper potential for experiencing. The first advantage and substep is that the person is enabled to actually enter into the scene of strong feeling, to literally live and be in this scene. Then the person is enabled to locate the elusive tiny moment in the scene, the instant when the feeling reaches its peak. The final advantage of the experiential alternative is that the person is enabled to use the frozen dilated moment of peak feeling to access, touch and be touched by, to discover the hidden deeper potential for experiencing. This precious discovery is almost certainly out of the reach of the ordinary therapist-client relationship. The Person Can Achieve a Remarkable New Relationship With the Deeper Experiencing Ordinarily, the person’s relationship with what lies truly deeper is characterized by fear and threat, distancing and separation, keeping it hidden, sealed off, unknown. One of the advantages of the experiential alternative is that the teachertherapist can help guide the relationship from bad to good, from fear and hate to welcoming and love. The change can be remarkable. One of the ways that the teacher can help accomplish this remarkable change is by being able to give voice to the person’s genuine reactions to the deeper experiencing, and to do so in a context of closeness and acceptance, honesty and openness, exaggeration and fantasy, silliness and whimsy, play and fun, and unbounded unreality. With attention focused on the deeper potential for experiencing, speaking with the voice of the person, the teacher says: “Being superior, better than, looking down on? That is definitely a bad thing, not one of the virtues. It has to be hidden, bottled up. It could ruin everything! No one likes someone like that! It’s awful! Seal it off.” Alternatively, the teacher can literally be and give voice to the deeper experiencing’s own personal feelings about the person: “I love being superior, better than, looking down on. It feels just wonderful, but she never even lets me come up for air! She keeps me suffocated, hidden! When has she ever felt wonderfully
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superior, joyfully better than others, having fun looking down on the inferior ones? Never! She’s awful! She is bad! It’s about time I gave her a piece of my mind!” By being the vibrant, energetic, honest, direct, outlandish voice of the person and also of the deeper experiencing, the teacher can help achieve a remarkable change in the relationship between the person and the deeper experiencing. The Person Can Achieve the Transformational Shift Into Becoming a Qualitatively New Person Perhaps the most magnificent achievement in the session is the radical shift into being the whole new person. This is a genuinely qualitative shift, a profound transformation, a metamorphosis of one person becoming a whole new person. This is a pinnacle achievement of the session. It is also a pinnacle advantage of the experiential alternative. This shift occurs when the person literally lets go of being the ordinary continuing self or person, and literally hurls oneself into fully and completely being the deeper potential for experiencing in specific scenes and situations. There are at least four ways that the experiential alternative helps in the transformational shift into becoming the qualitatively new person: (a) The teacher is exceedingly ready and willing to undergo this magnificent, radical, wholesale transformation. (b) The teacher knows what to do and how to do it, to accomplish the radical leap. (c) The teacher is seasoned and experienced, competent and proficient, in the actual methods of achieving this transformational shift. (d) The teacher joins with the person in actually undergoing the remarkable qualitative shift into becoming the qualitatively new person. These are some relatively concrete, in-session advantages that seem to come from and to justify the experiential alternative, but there is a more general, elevated advantage: The Experiential Alternative Is Custom-Designed to Help Achieve the Goals of an Experiential Session The purpose of the experiential alternative, the main reason it was developed and designed, was to enable the teacher to enable the person to go through a transformational session in which the person can become the qualitatively new person that the person can become, and also to be relatively free of the painful feelings and the painful scene that may have been front and center in the session. These are the two main goals of each experiential session, and they can be attained in large part because the experiential alternative was expressly developed and designed to help achieve these two goals. The challenge, and the practical advantage, is that each session can achieve these two goals better by using the experiential alternative, rather than the various
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forms of the ordinary therapist-client relationship in which the therapist and the client proceed through their session with their attention mainly on one another.
A GLIMPSE INTO AN EVEN MORE RADICAL FUTURE: EXPERIENTIAL SESSIONS ARE BY ONESELF, SKILL-LEARNING SESSIONS ARE WITH A TEACHER Throughout this article, the teacher and the person were together and worked together in proceeding through the session. Now picture the person going through the session by oneself. The person is becoming a “practitioner,” which means that the person is becoming a person who will be having one’s own experiential sessions by oneself (Mahrer, 2000, 2001c, 2002). Whether experiential sessions are undertaken by oneself or with a therapistteacher, each session consists of four steps, each with its own baby steps. Picture the “student” or “practitioner” in a room by oneself, trying to carry out the first few baby steps, or trying to go as far as the person is able to go through a session. After the session, picture the person going over a recording of the session with a teacher who shows the person how to do this and perhaps the next sequential baby step better and better. Practice sessions are followed by teaching sessions, and teaching sessions are followed by practice sessions until the person is sufficiently skilled to be able to proceed competently through a session by oneself. The traditional therapist-client relationship seems to require a therapist and a client in the therapy session. In the glimpse into the future, replace the therapist and the client so that the former “client” becomes a “practitioner” who is having one’s own sessions by oneself, and the former “therapist” becomes the “teacher” who studies the recording with the “student” or “practitioner” who is learning the skills of each sequential baby step in becoming proficient in carrying out the four steps of an experiential session.
CONCLUSIONS AND INVITATION 1. In virtually every psychotherapy, the therapist and the client attend mainly to one another throughout the session. From the perspective of experiential psychotherapy, this presents at least two problems: (a) Under that condition, psychotherapy becomes mainly a way for the therapist and the client to undergo important personal feelings in being with the other person. (b) Under that condition, the therapist and the client would have a hard time achieving the goals of an experiential session. 2. A large part of a solution to both problems is for the experiential teachertherapist and the person to attend mainly to the important “third thing,” rather than mainly to one another, throughout the session.
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3. By using the experiential alternative, both the teacher and the person can likely achieve some explicit, in-session advantages that are essentially unobtainable when therapist and client attend mainly to one another in the typical therapist-client relationship. 4. Psychotherapists are invited to consider the experiential alternative over the traditional therapist-client relationship, especially if the psychotherapist values a session in which (a) psychotherapy is not mainly a way for the therapist and the client to undergo important personal feelings in being with one another; (b) the practitioner wants to gain the in-session advantages from using the experiential alternative; (c) the person undergoes a qualitative, radical transformation into becoming the person that the person is capable of becoming; and (d) the person is free of the bad-feeling scene that was front and center for the person in the session. 5. For psychotherapists who are ready to glimpse into an even more radical future, the vision is of “practitioners” having their own experiential sessions by themselves, and learning the skills in separate training sessions with experiential teachers. REFERENCES Freud, S. (1913). On the beginning of treatment: Further recommendations on the technique of psychoanalysis. In J. Strachey (Ed.), Standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (pp. 122–144). London: Hogarth. Havens, L. L. (1986). Making contact: Uses of language in psychotherapy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Mahrer, A. R. (1989). Experiencing: A humanistic theory of psychology and psychiatry. Ottawa, Canada: University of Ottawa Press. Mahrer, A. R. (1996). The complete guide to experiential psychotherapy. New York: Wiley. Mahrer, A. R. (1997). Empathy as therapist-client alignment. In A. C. Bohart & L. S. Greenberg (Eds.), Empathy reconsidered: New directions in psychotherapy (pp. 187–213). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. Mahrer, A. R. (2000). How to use psychotherapy on, for, and by oneself. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 31, 226–229. Mahrer, A. R. (2001a). An experiential alternative to countertransference. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 57, 1021–1028. Mahrer, A. R. (2001b). If you want to do something about your own craziness, have your own experiential sessions. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, 31, 41–49. Mahrer, A. R. (2001c). An historical review of the field of psychotherapy – from the year 2199. Psychological Bulletin, 36, 9–14. Mahrer, A. R. (2002). Becoming the person you can become: The complete guide to self-transformation. Boulder, Colorado: Bull. Mahrer, A. R., Boulet, D. B., & Fairweather, D. R. (1994). Beyond empathy: Advances in the clinical theory and methods of empathy. Clinical Psychology Review, 14, 183–198. Major, R. & Miller, P. (1984). Empathy, antipathy, and telepathy in the analytic process. In J. Lichtenberg, M. Bornstein, & D. Silver (Eds.), Empathy II (pp. 227–248). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum. May, R. (1989). The art of counseling. New York: Gardner. Rothenberg, A. (1987). Empathy as a creative process in treatment. Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson.