Discussion

Dr. Hulbeck's rich and inspired paper seems to contain not three but five points of significance. In the beginning we are given an unusual but rather portentous definition of growth. Growth, says Dr. Hulbeck, is the ability “to see the deeper realities of life, though they are covered up and distorted.” We venture to assume that Dr. Hulbeck begins his paper with an implied therapeutic credo, namely the desirability of developing one's capacities to cognize the deeper realities of life. Thus psychotherapy can be rightfully considered a process of cognitive unfoldment.

The intimate relationship between cognition and creativity is rather self-evident. As a matter of fact, creativity can be thought of as consisting of a cognitive and an executive phase. We could point up here the marvellous way in which language reveals the meaning of creativity by saying that the creative individual realizes what he has realized. That is, he gives formal expression to what he has come to understand, perceive, cognize. And so we can say that Dr. Hulbeck in his paper endeavors to demonstrate to us the stages of the analytic process where the cognitive realizations of the therapeutic encounter are transformed first into dialogic realizations, then into existential realizations.

In his second point Dr. Hulbeck deals with the phenomenology of the encounter which he describes as a “collision of two different worlds.” To those unfamiliar with the dramatic language of existential philosophers this may sound somewhat jarring. However, what is undoubtedly meant here is the fact that in the encounter the patient