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(1)
A psychotherapist cannot fully conceal himself or herself from patients.
Age, sex, race, and marital status are usually obvious, and, often so are the therapist’s health and state of mind.
In addition, events in the therapist’s life often intrude into the therapeutic relationship.
A therapist’s marriage or engagement may be announced by a ring.
Therapists become pregnant and give birth.
Therapist become in or disabled, change job, or become public figures.
Other events in the therapist’s life, such as a death or severe illness in the family affect therapy by their direct influence on the therapist’s mood and ability to concentrate, and can alter a therapist’s reactions to patients in other ways.
Given the ebb and flow of life, the therapist does not remain the same over time.
Like his patients, the therapist’s self is the constantly changing product of his thoughts, feelings, experiences, genetic makeup, and physiological state.
No one can fully know himself, and no one can fully expose his self to another.
To introduce use of self as a therapeutic instrument, let us take the task of helping a woman deal with feelings about her mother’s death.
A neutral therapist would say “What did you feel?” or “You must have had some feeling reaction!” or simply “Tell me about it.”
Thus, he indicates technical expertise and willingness to deal with the patient’s feelings.
An open therapist displays concern, empathizes, or relates a similar experience in addition to applying his technical expertise.
The disclosing therapist says,
“It’s difficult for me to believe that you had no reaction to your mother’s death.
I know how strongly I feel at funerals, even if I’m not related to the dead person.”
By sharing his personal reactions, the therapist heightens emotional awareness and openly involves himself.
(2).
It was hardly a coincidence, for instance, that his theory followed a path that excavates buries material when his life-long obsession was with archaeology.
Not only did Freud spend his day digging into people’s past to uncover the meaning of their experiences, but he also spent most of his vacations on archaeological digs, as well as collecting ancient artifacts that adorned his office.
This was a man who believed in his soul that the past shapes who we are, and his theory reflected this intensely personal conviction.
Likewise, Victor Frankl, the inventor of one school of existential theory called logotherapy, developed his notions as a result of traumas he suffered in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.(Frankl,1997)
Day after day, as he watched friends, neighbors, and family members give up and die, or actually kill themselves by running into the guarded fence, he searched for some lager purpose to his tortuous existence.
This investigation into the meaning of his own suffering gave way to a whole system of helping others that was rooted in the construction of personal meaning.
（中略）
In a third example of how theories are influenced profoundly by the personal experiences of their inventors, Carl Rogers, the founder of person-centered therapy, developed an approach that followed perfectly his most deeply held conviction.
In his autobiography, Rogers(1980) reflect on one of his earliest memories from childhood the pleasure he felt when he could really hear someone.
（中略）
It is hardly surprising that Rogers would have developed a theory of helping that emphasize authentic relationships when he felt such an emptiness in his own life growing up.
He moved around a lot as a kid, never felt any roots, and admits he had close friends.
“I was socially incompetent,” Rogers discloses, “in any but superficial contacts”(1980, p. 30)
Yet, lo and behind, later in life he develops a theory of helping that holds as its most sacred principle the significance of an accepting, caring, nurturing relationship.
PR
