ABSTRACT
Counselling and psychotherapy are effective to the extent that they promote the creativity of clients or patients. Creativity is a life-style and a health resource. A creative life-style implies learning to be the authors of our own lives. In creative counselling and psychotherapy, hermeneutic principles are used as specific intervention strategies. In this way, professional and personal problems, psychic crises and disorders can be alleviated or removed altogether. Creative counselling serves to assist in coping with distress and circumscribed conflicts by way of memory, narrative shaping and interactional experience of the relationship of the client to him/herself and his/her social environment. Creative psychotherapy is an aspect of psychodynamic and integrative therapies. The hermeneutic principles—memory, narrative shaping, interactional experience—are activated so as to remove certain psychopathological symptoms. The academic element in creative counselling and psychotherapy lies in the realization that psychosocial reality—real life and genuine subjective experience—cannot be adequately captured by technology and science.
