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The therapeutic situation is a bipolar unitary process. Doctor and patient are the two aspects of this single integral reality, having a subject and an object pole. Subject is used to mean to subject, to influence, to effect, to act as environment of the object. Object means that which objects, which is temporarily and to a degree under the influence of an environment governed by laws heteronomous to the object's nature. From moment to moment doctor and patient function, now as subject and now as object, for the other.
From such a concept of the therapeutic situation, it follows that the notion of an uninfluenced or uninfluencing therapist or patient is not tenable. Put otherwise, the therapeutic situation is a constant and continuous, mutually and reciprocally influencing, human situation.
The notion of passivity is also not tenable. Passivity in therapist and/or patient can be a very active and stubborn problem. The passivity is only apparently so, for in nature, and hence in human nature, all processes are active. Likewise this concept of the therapeutic situation does away with the spurious dualism of individual versus environment and puts in its place the concept of individual in environment. Doctor and patient are in and of the environment of each other. Instead of the false dichotomy of therapist versus his patient, with its inherent notion of irreconcilable opposition, we now have a process feeling of and for unity in diversity, mutual enrichment through similarities and differences, through conflict and cooperation. Pseudo-scientific attempts to contract the therapist out of his patient's environment are not in keeping with twentieth century notions of science. The notions of the therapist as a fixed coordinate and a nonparticipating observer in the therapeutic situation is based