ABSTRACT
The therapist needs to attend to her experience in the room, moment by moment, but also needs to “bracket” all sorts of thoughts and feelings and impulses. The client has no obligation to do this. Humanistic psychotherapy’s failure to address the power dynamics in the therapeutic relationship goes hand in hand with its philosophical refusal to accept “dysfunction”. Humanism, with its emphasis on here and now relationship and process, seems to lack a language to describe the therapeutic space or “frame” and its function in the aspect of psychotherapy that is a professional, contractual “service”. It is not unusual for humanistic therapists in the UK to work at home. The therapeutic frame takes the form of a contract about what the client can and cannot expect and what the therapist will and will not do, will or will not allow. In this sense it includes the ground rules and mutual agreements that will form the basis of the working alliance.
