Today I am thinking about a trend among my professional colleagues. It is like what happens among theologians who become enamoured of an idea and then run with it, moving so fast over the ground of constructs and precepts that they begin to lose touch with everyday life in flights of theoretical and conceptual indulgence. Some of my colleagues have left behind the idea of the individual and turned a person's subjective experience into a relationship or a collective called 'the field'. In the meantime, I see individuals on a daily basis, and although they are certainly dependant on the world in which they live, and although they are involved in relationships, many are clearly interested in sorting themselves out before they involve anybody else in the process.

In a soon-to-be published article for the British Gestalt Journal, Gianni Francesetti writes of diagnosing, and when he does, he says that it is not a matter of the individual who is in pain but of the 'boundary' (that place of meeting between a person and another) that is suffering. He views all psychological dysfunction as a problem of the boundary, where it is never just one person's maladaption, but a problem of the relationship between one and another.

I like much of what he writes. For instance, he points out that sometimes the person in pain is not the person with a psychological disorder.

Sometimes the one most dysfunctional causes others to become anxious or depressed even while he or she is subjectively quite content with him or herself.

I know this to be true from meeting with so many couples. When someone comes to me, I listen for the way he or she describes the concern. If the person keeps referring to a partner or a relative, someone with whom he or she has a significant relationship (it could also be a work relationship), then I know that, indeed, the most efficient way to handle it is to get the other person into the office as well. However, if the person is speaking a lot about his or her subjective experience in a free floating, unattached fashion, it's not about a relationship in the same way. It's about that person's sense that something is not complete. Something is out of place. Something in the life of such a person, something inside the person, is not at peace.

Yesterday I went snorkelling at Warwick Long Bay. Unfortunately, I attached the snorkel to the mask backward, so that when I went to use it, to put it into my mouth and breath from it, it pulled against my mouth and pulled the mask a bit away from my face. That resulted in water leaking into the mask so that I had to stop routinely to empty the water out. At first I thought I could handle it; I would just live with it for this time. However, it was more than an inconvenience. Together with the fact that I kept getting arch cramps using the fins, I was having trouble. The water was choppy, and I was getting tired from all the adjusting. Sometimes I swallowed a bit of the ocean. Sometimes salt water got into my eyes. When I finally decided to call it quits, I realised I was more tired from fighting it all than I had realised. The swim back to the shore was arduous.

This is how it is when a person has individual difficulty in life and comes for individual counselling. They are cramping up, swallowing stuff that isn't good for them, sore from trying to see through 'salt water', and generally just becoming aware that they are more tired than they thought, having difficulty swimming through choppy circumstances.

Situations such as this are not relationship problems.

So, if a therapist forces the subjective experience of the client into a theoretical container, insisting that nothing is actually an individual problem, the client might be puzzled, trying to figure out who put their 'snorkel' on backwards if it were not themselves who did it. Who is the other, when swimming against the waves just seems something between a person and the water? Is it a relationship problem between a person and the ocean? I can see how there is a relationship between each of us and the environment, between each of us and our internalised 'others', (those who were formative as we were growing and developing), but sometimes it's just that we put upon ourselves unnecessary obligations and requirements, and it's really just up to us to fix it.

It's not up to the therapist. It's not up to the pastor. It's not up to mommy and daddy. It's not the spouse's fault. It's nobody else's fault, and it's up to nobody else but oneself to change things. Will such change be worked out in connection with others? Yes, of course.

We all live the same world with one another. However, that is such a common place given that you might as well say that anything is a matter of breathing; one must breath in order to solve one's problems. Duh.

The most effective therapists are those who stay with their clients but who do not become fix-it people, as if they could do the work for the client. The most effective therapists form real relationships with their clients, but in the end the most salient factor common to positive outcomes is what the client brings to therapy. Clients must come motivated for change with a willingness and an interest in trying out new behaviours, risking the unfamiliar, and becoming a bit uncomfortable. That is all about the individual client.

This one or that one has either got these positive factors or not. If a person doesn't have them, the collective, the 'field' cannot supply them.