ABSTRACT
In my view, any helping endeavour needs to be considered as an alliance between helper and helpee. This is true whether the intervention is therapy-focused or coaching-focused. Working alliance theory is based on the pioneering work of Ed Bordin (1979) who took the psychoanalytic concept of the ‘working alliance’, updated it and showed the generalisability of his updated framework. In what follows I will use my reformulation of Bordin’s (1979) tripartite model of the working alliance (Dryden, 2011, 2017b). This posits that there are four components of the alliance: bonds, views, goals and tasks.
