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Although Paul Gordon has not claimed this directly, Face to Face is a book for all psychotherapists. This book is the assembly of a core ethical and theoretical position and unavoidably addresses some difficult questions about the current state of psychotherapy. Whilst Gordon is as suspicious of ‘caring’ (p. 21) as he is of the ‘odour of sanctimony’ (p. 21) as motive forces in psychotherapy, this is a book about ethics, morals and sharing responsibility for what is happening around us in a fast and inexorably changing professional climate. In this sense it is a book with great care for the practice of psychotherapy.
It is not a book of clinical or just theoretical material but, as Gordon says, he has drawn upon all his experience as a therapist and this important work is carefully and sensitively informed by it. It is an ethical statement implicating the subjective commitment of the author to his work. The illusive object of psychotherapy is the subject of discussion. It is a problem which the author admits he does not offer as a direct question because he fears misinterpretation. The misinterpretation is that he would be misunderstood as saying what psychotherapy is rather than inviting the individual to discover for himself how he might be ‘Face to Face’ in a psychotherapeutic relationship, and by this he means something real, meaningful and essentially human. He does not eschew the couch but, inspired by the work of Emmanuel Levinas, he is making another point. The Face is the epiphany of the individual, the unique, at first optical connection with another human being which establishes an inalienable relatedness to the world of human beings. Gordon adumbrates the Levinasian convictions of human responsibility as a priori to the concerns superimposed by training and professional status.
A theme of this book suggests that we have lost our way with preoccupations about power and colonizing information and knowledge. Gordon cites an example of the rebuke handed out by