On Relating

A real psychologist, who has the skill to understand the mountains and valleys of others in the moment, is almost antithetical to the psychologist on paper -- the researcher, the professor. A lot of people make this mistake. You're good at reading people, you have a knack for personality theories, you love the sacred interaction between two souls, and you love being the healer in person's history that has had little else but tormentors and microstessors -- well then, I'm going to study psychology. But you'd be surprised. This intuitive, caring compass for others gets buried away in latency, or at the very least severely mediated, by statistical analyses, hours of research, experimental and control groups, speculation with experts, main effect or no main effect, type type type your twenty-eight pages, prayers for publication.

This is all vital, but a therapist needs warm bodies, as much as the selves who own these bodies need him. The therapist contains the remnants of the archetypal sage. There's something terribly sacred here. All other life is hustle and bustle, self annihilation in worries and work, kids and spouses, love and loss. The therapist genuinely smiles as she opens the door for her client, and even though the sheer insanity of society pours through, the moment the lock clicks all these poisonous fumes dissolve away. Now we're alone. Now we can talk. Now there's intimacy, and with it the lucidity of pure relation and the beginnings of the God-only-knows power of being born again to wholeness. Oh, clients are rarely ever that collaborative, but that's the direction, contrary to all other directions the world prefers -- directions that lead to looking beyond, to self concealment, to the loss of really feeling others in the moment, to fear of loving and being loved, to fear of living. Simply walking this sanctified direction is the right way, towards listening to yourself, towards the salvation of personal meaning. It's the contagious world that's broken first. And it's the simple act of being there that convinces the needful that they're not as lost as they believe. This being there, this listening and carefully responding, this value of the other beyond his constituents of personality -- that's really love, isn't it? Therapists are professional lovers.