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During Recent Years, those of US who engage in psychotherapeutic encounters have become increasingly concerned with identifying and clarifying aspects of the transaction which help the patient to change. There are a number of schools which approach behavior from a variety of theoretical points of view. Each school has developed its own conceptual framework, its own dialect and its own explanations for the therapeutic interventions in which it engages. Very frequently, the actual encounter between the patient and the therapist is inadequately conceptualized and incompletely described. When we have the opportunity to observe skilled therapists in action, we note that what they actually do in the encounter with the patient seems to have very little relationship to what they write in papers on technique. In reviewing the literature on Psychotherapeutic technique, it becomes evident that much of what is written is a discussion of differences that make no difference to the patient, the process or the outcome. There are many examples in every therapist's practice of technical errors within the conduct of a specific psychotherapeutic hour which have turned out to be therapeutic rather than anti-therapeutic. Indeed, there is some literature which discusses the use and effect of the incomplete and the incorrect interpretation.1
A detailed study of the theories of human behavior which are basic to schools of psychotherapy does not seem to lead to the identification of the crucial independent variables in treatment, but only to a different conceptualization of the process. When the process is described as making the unconscious conscious, interpreting resistance, fostering and interpreting the regressive transference, then we are describing the classical psychoanalytic technique. If the therapist engages with his patient in the collaborative effort of exploring states of consciousness, world construction, and life style in the “here and now,” then he is using existential analyti