ABSTRACT
I want to try to see how this approach alters the way one treats patients. The first thing to realize is that when you are speaking with a patient, the words are vehicles that carry an emotional message. Therefore, the actual mentality—mental state of the analyst or therapist—is the crucial factor. The healing factor is what one might call the benign meeting between two minds that come together. It is not essentially the words—it is the communication that's occurring between the emotional states of the two people. It has happened to me very often when supervising someone that they say, "I had such and such a thought, but, of course, I didn't say anything about it", and then it is quite clear from what follows that the patient has timed into the therapist's thought. Maybe this is quite a good place to start—that if you have a thought and the thought has been generated from within the situation, you always need a good reason not to impart it. In other words, your medicine chest is made up of the thoughts that you have in the session. So if you ever find yourself saying, "Well, I had this thought, but I didn't say it or didn't act upon it", there may be reasons why you say to yourself "Well, I won't", but the burden is on you to explain 118why not. In other words, it is a bit like a doctor who has a medicine in his cupboard, and someone comes in with flu, and he's got the right medicine to hand out, but doesn't do so. He may have a reason for not doing so—that it might give the person pneumonia or something if he does—but the usual thing is that you have to ask why. I emphasize this because therapists often have a thought that they don't impart. If you link this with what I've said about creative communication, and then, your thoughts are not purely yours—they have arisen through the interaction between the two of you. You and a friend bake a cake together, and you eat the whole of it—not very generous. It is the meeting of healthy creative minds that is the curative factor.
