ABSTRACT
In 1969, I had been working as a person-centred counsellor for less than a year when there appeared a book by Professor Paul Halmos entitled The Faith of the Counsellors. I remember finding this book exhilarating and also somewhat unnerving, because it blew my cover. Halmos’s mischievous thesis was that social workers, therapists, and the like had developed increasingly complex theories of human personality and interaction as a smoke-screen behind which they could get on with the business of loving their clients and feel legitimate in doing so. Privately, this seemed to me at the time to be a pretty fair assessment of my own journey into the therapeutic profession. I had previously been a schoolmaster, where I was certainly motivated more by my love of young people than by my interest in literature or languages, genuine though the latter undoubtedly was. It was my involvement with a succession of anguished teenagers, however, which showed me that I was most vibrantly alive when I could devote myself entirely to a relationship where I was free to respond to the other and to the alleviation of his or her pain.
