ABSTRACT
The clients and patients described in counselling and therapy accounts want nothing more than to be “at home” in their internal and external worlds. In creative counselling and psychotherapy, the “professional” couple assumes the stewardship for unstructured, threatening, sometimes even repulsive or rejected elements that have subsumed in the term “the child within”. An essential aspect of the “art of relationships” is for the partners to integrate different internal objects and configurations of self into a tolerant, rather than a hostile or marginalizing form of communication. Fortunately, there is a corrective for the more confusing aspects of a therapeutic couple relationship. It is the therapeutic and professional attitude. Clients and patients provide access to a counselling or therapeutic “play area” by virtue of the very fact that they agree to speak. They provide more than mere information from which the counsellor or therapist can draw correct conclusions or derive accurate explanations.
