ABSTRACT
The everyday reality with which people are vitally concerned is mostly intersubjective, involving the shared imagining of experience. Modern science favours objectivity, physicality and its application even to the human sciences. Psychotherapy focuses on understanding and the ways in which people are affected during communicative exchange and in the spaces of internal reverberation. The interpersonal philosophies of Hegel, James, Heidegger and Wittgenstein are seen to provide an underpinning for the discipline of psychotherapy. Language as it is lived in community provides an elastic network of meaning, perhaps mirroring the object-seeking properties of neural systems as they are realized through experiences of significance. From the beginning, humans are participants in a symbolic world that needs to take account of language as a felt experience in relationships where it becomes a regulator of self-experience and emergent personality.
