ABSTRACT
This chapter examines in depth the dearth of reported client experiences of therapy—the extent of the dearth and its effects on the legitimacy of the cultural project of therapy. It explores thorny question of the efficacy of therapy, and the associated difficulty of saying anything either "objective" or reliably subjective about the therapeutic experience, from either the client's or the therapist's standpoint. The chapter offers the nature of the profession-centred therapeutic discourse through which therapy is predominantly offered in Western culture. Ann France makes the telling point that "consumers" of therapy have a powerful vested interest in making it into a positive experience, whether in a tangibly authentic or a self-deluding way: "one does not want to have spent all that time and money for nothing". Even more complicating for the would-be researcher is that one can also not assume that a client's subjectively negative experience of therapy necessarily means that therapy was not enabling experience for her or him.
