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PRACTICAL PROBLEMS FORCE THEMSELVES on us, and we have to look for answers to save our skins. Theoretical problems do not force themselves on us so directly. They are perennial, like problems of philosophy. As we age we develop a dignified modus vivendi in which we promise not to bother the problems and they in turn refrain from bothering us. It might even be that this insouciance is what distinguishes the mature therapist from the novice: the novice is a therapist who is aware of theoretical difficulties which make him uneasy and defensive. The mature therapist is no less comfortable than any workman with a difficult assignment. at worst he is defensive in response to his patient, but never in response to his calling. Unlike the novice, the veteran is stabilized by technical complacency.
If this seems a peculiar characterization, I remind you that one dominant way of training is to translate the trainee's work difficulties into terms of his own personal difficulties, and a logical implication of this is that there are no difficulties intrinsic to the work, i.e., no important theoretical problems of psychotherapy. I will pick this point up again later in connection with problems of training. I mention it here only as evidence that we may occasionally have to force-march ourselves into the theoretical wilderness to count and tag the puzzles that made trouble for us when we began and are still around even if they no longer trouble us.
Of these puzzles, I suppose, the one that we can most easily remember starting with is how to relate the effect of our spoken understandings to the effect of the developing personal relationship. The