Explorations in the Uses of Language in Psychotherapy:—Counterprojective Statements

… it was she who first gave me the idea that a person does not (as I had imagined) stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface, like a garden at which, with all its borders spread out before us, we gaze through a railing, but is a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating, of which there is no such thing as direct knowledge, with respect to which we form countless beliefs, based upon his words and sometimes upon his actions, though neither words nor actions can give us anything but inadequate and as it proves contradictory information—a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.— Proust

THE PURPOSE OF THESE EXPLORATIONS is to find language effective in particular psychotherapeutic situations. One would like to have on hand a large number of verbal tools that are sharp-edged enough to shape even resistant situations.

I have suggested (Havens 1978) that the principal verbal tools can be characterized as interrogative, imperative, rhetorical, and declarative. The interrogative label is obvious; questions remain the principal device for even psychotherapeutic investigations. It is not so obvious that free associative work operates under a subtle imperative. The "fundamental rule" of psychoanalysis is an imperative, "say whatever comes to mind", and the silences, repetitions, and urgings that make up much of the analyst's work all sound at least a supplicatory note.

Empathic work is necessarily rhetorical. This is because "the imaginative projection of one's own consciousness into another being" (Webster's 1963), which is empathy, requires an imaginative expression of that new consciousness if it is to be shared; and rhetoric is the art of expressive speech (Havens 1978), (1979).

Further, it occurred to me that declarative statements could also