ABSTRACT
This is the story of the early years of my therapeutic work with my patient, Adam—a young man who, as I came to see it, probed actively to assess my capacity for what I would call realness, reciprocity, presence. The meaning of my empathy seemed to depend, in good part, on how Adam saw and read my inner experience of myself and of him and on how I experienced being seen, known, by him. How, in the process of facilitating inner change for him, we both engaged around the same basic set of universal, human, existential issues.
