Emphasis on Feelings and Emotions. The reli-
ance on subjective experience and feelings binds the
clinician to a source of data that can be unreliable,
biased, or self-serving, and devoid of the most
human of all qualities—reason. The real issue is
whether feelings or transcendental awareness,
unleavened by sober analysis, reason, and insight,
can lead the individual into a durable adjustment
that will increase both personal satisfactions and
social contributions. It seems evident now that
most individuals cannot work their way out of
problems and private terrors solely by the applica-
tion of cold analysis and reason. But it does not
seem likely that trips into what can be a quagmire
of subjectivity will enable them to do so either.
Perhaps the lesson here is that any single method
or route is likely to be incomplete and therefore less
than successful. Human beings think, act, feel,
experience, look to the past for guidance, and are
pulled into the future by their aspirations. Any
approach that focuses on behavior alone, or experi-
ence alone, or insight alone ignores much that is a
central part of the human being. When such single-
edged approaches work (at least for a while), it is
probably because they confront individuals with an
aspect of themselves that they had long ignored. For
example, an inhibited, overintellectual, repressed
patient may find great joy and happiness as she
works herself through an“emotional now,”guided
by a sensitive therapist. However, any long-term
abandonment of intellect and reason is likely to
lead to other problems.
Phenomenal Field. Another problem is whether
one person can ever completely know the nature of
another person’s subjective experience. Phenomenol-
ogy instructs that a person’s behavior is determined by
his or her phenomenal field as it exists at any moment
intime.Thisplacesthetherapistinthepositionof
having to know the patient’sinnerworldofexperi-
ence in order to understand or predict. Yet how do
clinicians climb into that world? How do they escape
from the past experiences that have shaped their own
perceptions? How do clinicians gain an unbiased
appreciation of the patient’s phenomenal awareness?
It almost seems that the phenomenological viewpoint
demands something of clinicians that, given all
humans’very imperfect and biased nature, it is impos-
sible for them to achieve.
The problem is not with an empathic attempt
to get close to the patient’s experience or to“try to
put oneself in the patient’s shoes.”It is always useful
to search one’s own experience to better relate to
the patient’s feelings or predicaments (while recog-
nizing the ever-present danger of bias). The prob-
lem lies in the exclusive reliance on the clinician’s
exact knowledge of the patient’s inner experience
in order to operate as a clinician.Assessment. In many of the humanistic-
existential approaches, there is a total disregard for
assessment and diagnosis. This disregard is rein-
forced by the belief that assessment interferes with
or destroys the empathic relationship. Assessment is
seen as impinging on the freedom and dignity of
the individual. It is believed to thwart the self-
actualizing potential of the client by imposing a
conceptualization from the therapist.
Many will agree that diagnosis is not always
necessary in its more full-blown manifestations.
Indeed, the humanistic-existential movement has
rendered a real service by pointing out some of
clinical psychology’s diagnostic excesses and by sug-
gesting that too often diagnostic emphasis is on
pathology rather than the growth potential or
strengths of patients. It is all too true that diagnosis
has often become a search for weaknesses rather
than strengths and assets.
But if clinical psychologists were to totally
reject assessment, where would this leave them?
With the patient’s verbal report perhaps—with all
its potential for distortion and incompleteness. Faith
in patients’abilities to solve their problems through
getting in touch with their own feelings may work
well with intelligent, introspective, sophisticated
young persons who are not terribly disturbed. But
what about the patient who is psychotic or the
patient who is burdened with psychosomatic
problems? And how does one deal with the non-
verbal person who has only a minimal education
and has never learned to look inward? Does the
clinician ignore assessment in the case of the personPSYCHOTHERAPY: PHENOMENOLOGICAL AND HUMANISTIC-EXISTENTIAL PERSPECTIVES 391