ABSTRACT
No matter what my training, education and experience, when I open the door to a client, I do not know what will unfold – for him or for me. Even with my high and mighty ethical aspirations that I wear like a badge, I will only know when a moment has passed, that I was able to stand by what I felt my beliefs about existence to be. Or not. What follows, is a conversation between old friends. My experience of being a PC therapist is often agonizing and fraught in a precarious and yet fertile landscape, and for that I am thankful. If any therapy takes place, it does so by accident as a by-product of person-to-person encounter: an accident that gives way to a contingent birthing. This contingency is profoundly embedded in a kind of inter-random process, based on a radical ethic that may well betray the party-line and assumed social order. Exploring ideas from the therapeutic realm along with those from literature and philosophy, this chapter will be in praise of precariousness, and challenge the misunderstanding and frequent disregard for the radical ethics implicit in a person-centred attitude towards the organism.
