What Works in Counseling, Psychotherapy, and Psychoanalysis: Owning One’s Perceptual Filter

In counseling, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis, both patient and therapist are hypothesis ‘testers’ moment-to-moment in an effort to construct models to read or make sense out of current and anticipated future experiences. Each bring to the therapeutic relationship family-of-origin interaction and relationship templates that filter interpretation or help them better construe and read moment-to-moment slices of time based on their past, lived experience. Psychotherapists and psychoanalysts must be willing to alter the permeability of their own ways of construing experience, their cognitive personal construct networks, in order to support, encourage, or potentiate change in a patient’s way of being in the world. Such is the nature of the post-modern, constructivist, and intersubjective approach to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy that I practice.